Optical detectors in SOI CMOS technologies for blue DVD and short distance optical communication
(2006)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Flandre, Denis
- Abstract
- Nowadays the Silicon optoelectronic market is in rapid expansion in applications such as imaging, optical storage and optical communication. Furthermore, as CMOS transistors are scaled down to improve data processing, the effectiveness of data transfer from chip to chip or intra chip via local buses and electrical interconnections is not improving with scaling as much as the speed of transistors. Today, these interconnections are really a bottleneck that one wants to replace by optical interconnections. To be economically viable, this implies to monolithically integrate the optical receiver, composed of a photodetector, which converts the optical signal into an electrical signal, and the receiver front-end and post amplifiers, which amplify and shape the signal in the electrical domain. As conventional BULK CMOS technologies increasingly suffer from parasitics due to scaling, SOI CMOS technology has been introduced to improve the performances of the transistors and circuits. One of the questions pending, however, was to understand the effect of the SOI particular structure, with the presence of a buried oxide and a thin absorbing silicon film, for optical applications as, in the literature, thin-film SOI photodetectors suffer from a lack of modeling in order to design and predict their fundamental DC and AC characteristics such as responsivity and bandwidth. The contribution of this thesis consists in a thorough study of thin-film SOI CMOS technology and a demonstration of its adequacy to realize both Si photodetectors and IC receivers that push beyond the state-of-the-art, i.e. for 10Gb/s and blue DVD applications. This is achieved through the development of a complete reusable top-down transdisciplinary modeling validated by numerical simulations and experimental measurements. This modeling allows for identifying the physical and technological parameters of interest, quantifying their impact on device and system performances and therefrom efficiently designing thin-film SOI optical receivers. Photodetector (responsivity, quantum efficiency and dark current, cut-off frequency and complex impedance behaviour vs. frequency) and receiver (bandwidth, transimpedance gain, noise, dynamic range and sensitivity) performances have been analytically modeled, simulated and measured on SOI PIN photodiodes and transimpedance circuits in various SOI CMOS technologies. An optical receiver circuit realized in a 0.13 µm Partially-Depleted SOI CMOS technology operating at 10GHz is demonstrated experimentally.
- Affiliations
Citations
Afzalian, A. (2006). Optical detectors in SOI CMOS technologies for blue DVD and short distance optical communication. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/124141