The bandwidth requirements for global communication networks are increasing each year due to the rapid growth of multimedia (broadband) applications. To accommodate this growth, an increasing number of wide-area and local-area networks are converting the transmission medium from copper wire to fiber. As such, the deployment of optical fiber communication systems for emerging high-speed networks (10 - 40 gigabits-per-second) mandates integrated and low-cost designs for optical transceivers. CMOS, with its low-cost, system-on-chip, and mixed-signal capabilities, is a suitable alternative to other more expensive technologies, such as silicon germanium or gallium arsenide. On the other hand, limitations of sub-micron CMOS technology, namely the higher parasitic capacitances, higher noise, and low-quality integrated passive elements, make the design of an integrated optical transceiver in CMOS technology a challenging task. The design, fabrication and characterization of a broadband transimpedance amplifier in an analog front-end of an optical receiver will be presented in this thesis. The chip was designed and fabricated using a TSMC 0.18 (mu)m CMOS technology. It was measured and characterized, achieving a -3dB bandwidth of 1.5 GHz and 37 dB(omega) of transimpedance gain, with less than -7 dB input and output reflections to a 50 (omega) measurement interface, while consuming 23.8 mW from a 1.8 V supply and using 1 x 0.781 mm^2 of silicon chip area. The strengths and limitations of this design will be discussed and its performance will be compared to published results. Conclusions will be drawn and recommendations will be proposed to demonstrate the utility of this design in future work on fully integrated optical receiver systems. Next, an optical transmitter prototype circuit, built by using low-cost, off-the-shelf photonic and microelectronic components, was fabricated and tested in order to assess the performance of directly modulated lasers for use in low-cost multi-gigabit-per-second optical transmitter modules. The performance of the transmitter was assessed for a fiber link spanning 10 km of standard single-mode optical fiber. This work illustrates how the non-idealities and imperfections of low-cost components can significantly degrade the overall system performance in high-speed applications; therefore, recommendations will be proposed so as to improve the performance in spite of these limitations. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/23305 |
| Date | 01 1900 |
| Creators | Palubiak, Dariusz |
| Contributors | Deen, M. J., Kumar, Shiva, Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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