Monolithically integrated optical receiver with large‐area avalanche photodiode in high‐voltage CMOS technology

A novel monolithically integrated optoelectronic receiver with a 200 µm diameter, high responsivity avalanche photodiode (PD) is presented. The whole receiver was developed in a high‐voltage 0.35 µm CMOS technology. This permits high PD bias voltages and the implementation of the receiver circuitry in a single chip. With a PD bias voltage of 65 V, a high responsivity of 30 A/W has been reached at a wavelength of 675 nm. Together with a folded‐cascode transimpedance amplifier, the complete receiver achieves a sensitivity of −31.8 dBm at a data rate of 1 Gbit/s with a bit error rate of 10 −9 and a pseudorandom binary sequence of 2 31 –1.