Design for Stability of High-Speed Integrated Photoreceivers: A Tutorial

We propose a Design for Stability (DFS) methodology dedicated to the design of reliable high-speed integrated photoreceiver front-ends. This methodology based on the stability factor, S-parameters and Z-parameters analysis is made of four rules that high-speed designers will apply during the stability check of their design. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the proposed DFS methodology was applied to build a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) compliant to Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) OC-192 (10-Gb/s) standard. Experimental results in agreement with initial design specifications show excellent performances such as: 11 GHz bandwidth, −20 dBm sensitivity measured at 10-Gb/s for a Bit Error Rate (BER) of 10^{− 9} and 10 ps peak-to-peak jitter.