Compact and Transfer Printable 64 Gb/s Differential Transimpedance Amplifier in 130-nm BiCMOS

摘要

This paper presents the design and performance comparison a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) first implemented in the standard IHP SG13G2 technology while the second one utilizes a new back-end technology for a transfer printing process. In order to make the TIA design compatible with the transfer printing technology, the topmost metal layer (TM2) is eliminated. As a result, custom inductors are developed using adopting the four lower level metal layers. Small signal measurement of both designs reveal a transimpedance gains above 66 and 68 dBΩ till 40 GHz of signal bandwidth. thus, the use of the transfer printing technology cause only 2 dBΩ loss. The measured S11remains below -10 dB up to 60 and 70 GHz, respectively. The measured eye diagrams at 64 Gbps prove the performance of the transfer printing approach being able to compete with state-of-the-art transimpedance amplifiers' performance.