Sirenza develops 40Gbps tunable TIA

Sirenza Microdevices Inc. has developed a 40Gbps common-base transimpedance amplifier (TIA) that employs an electronically tunable transimpedance bandwidth control to compensate various combinations of photodetectors and hybrid interconnect parasitics.

Fabricated using InP HBT technology, the TIA achieves a 62.3dB-ohm differential transimpedance with a bandwidth of 39.3GHz, while consuming 165mW of dc power. This corresponds to a transimpedance-bandwidth product per dc power of 310 ohms-GHz/mW, which the company claims to be the highest values reported in the industry for 40Gbps common-gate or common-base TIAs.

Kevin Kobayashi, Director of Advanced Design at Sirenza noted, "Achieving high performance while conserving dc power is attractive from a system cost and reliability standpoint, especially for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) systems configured for the efficient transport of data where component count, power consumption, and cost can add up quickly."