JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 17, NO. 4, APRIL 1999 659 A Proposed OEIC Receiver Using MESFET Photodetector P. Chakrabarti and V. Rajamani Abstract—An optical receiver conﬁguration based on the con- cept of using a single optically gated metal–semiconductor–ﬁeld- effect transistor (MESFET) to perform the function of a pho- todetector and preampliﬁer has been introduced. The proposed optoelectronic integrated circuit (OEIC) receiver has been ana- lyzed theoretically. A simpliﬁed noise model of the receiver has also been developed. Results have been presented for an OEIC receiver based on InGaAs MESFET supposed to be fabricated with matured InGaAs/InP MMIC technology. Theoretical results based on a simplistic noise model reveal that the proposed OEIC receiver has superior performance characteristics over the existing optical receivers. Index Terms— Metal–semiconductor–ﬁeld-effect transistor (MESFET), optoelectronic integrated circuit (OEIC), photodetector, transimpedence gain sensitivity. I. INTRODUCTION T HE optoelectronic integrated circuit (OEIC) receiver is an emergent technology for monolithic integration of optoelectronic and electronic devices on the same semicon- ductor substrate. Initial work in the area of OEIC receivers was conﬁned to the development of hybrid integrated circuits (IC’s) in which discrete devices on separate functional blocks or chips are connected using electronic (leads) or optical (ﬁber) interconnects. Later on, attention was focused on the development of a monolithically integrated photoreceiver [1] which offers signiﬁcant advantages over hybrid forms. From the existing literature we know that most of the OEIC re- ceivers are based on conventional photodetectors followed FET (ﬁeld-effect transistor), HEMT (high-electron mobility transistor) also known as MODFET (modulated-doped ﬁeld- effect transistor) or HBT (heterojunction bipolar transistor) preampliﬁers. In the FET based OEIC receivers, the preampliﬁers are based either on the junction-ﬁeld-effect transistor (JFET) or metal–semiconductor–ﬁeld-effect transistor (MESFET) or metal–insulator–semiconductor ﬁeld-effect transistor (MIS- FET). The photodetector is usually a pin photodiode, a metal–semiconductor–metal (MSM) photodiode or an avalanche photodiode (APD). Cheng et al. [2] fabricated a monolithically integrated InGaAs pin photodiode and an InP Manuscript received March 30, 1998; revised October 21, 1998. This work was supported by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, under Grant SP/S2/L-15/95. The authors are with the Department of Electronics Engineering, Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi 221005 India. Publisher Item Identiﬁer S 0733-8724(99)02680-8. MISFET using vertical integration scheme. This OEIC receiver has been reported to have a sensitivity of 27 dBm at the speed of 400 Mb/s. In the same year an OEIC receiver based on the InGaAs pin photodiode and JFET ampliﬁers were reported [3] and [4]. Matsuda et al. [4] demonstrate the operation of a monolithically integrated InGaAs pin photodiode and transimpedance ampliﬁer with 4 JFET’s biased using a single 5 V supply. This OEIC receiver had a transimpedance gain of 965 ohms and speed of 400 Mb/s. An improved speed of 600 Mb/s with 25.4 dBm sensitivity was reported by Antreasyan et al. [5]. This receiver consisted of an InGaAs pin photodiode and InP MISFET grown by vapor phase epitaxy. A high sensitivity ( 25 dBm) photoreceiver based on ion- implanted JFET in an InGaAs/InP pin-FET conﬁguration was reported by Baur et al. [6]. The receiver had however, poor speed (200 Mb/s). The bandwidth of the InGaAs/InP pin- JFET OEIC receiver was improved to 1.2 GHz with the help of a novel structure grown by organometallic vapor phase epitaxy (OMVPE) [7]. Yoshida et al. [8] fabricated an InGaAs pin photodiode and an InGaAs JFET by metal organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) crystal growth and Be- ion implantation. The sensitivity limit of a long-wavelength monolithic integrated pin-JFET photoreceiver was investigated in this work. A 622 Mb/s monolithic InGaAs/InP pin-FET OEIC receiver with a sensitivity of 35.4 dBm using a cascode ampliﬁer was reported by Uchida et al. [9]. The speed of the FET based OEIC receiver was further improved by the use of MSM photodetector and MESFET preampliﬁer. The design and fabrication of 1 Gb/s OEIC receiver based on GaAs-MSM photodetector and GaAs-MESFET preampliﬁer was reported by Shih et al. [10] for operation at 0.8 m wavelength exhibiting a high gain of 90 dB and sensitivity of 20.5 dBm at 1 Gb/s. The speed was later improved to 2.5 Gb/s by Chang [11] for the same conﬁguration by fully integrating an ion-implanted GaAs MESFET with MSM photodetector. The studies reported so far reveal that the OEIC receivers based on the FET’s have modest bandwidth, limiting their speed upto 2.5 Gb/s. It is also evident from the survey of the existing literature that the speed of the FET-based OEIC receiver improves drastically with the use of a MESFET in the preampliﬁer stage in place of the conventional JFET and high-speed MSM detector, for example, in the optical detection stage. In an attempt to improve the speed further, we propose a novel MESFET based OEIC receiver conﬁguration which uses a single optically gated MESFET for both photodetection and ampliﬁcation purpose. 0733–8724/99$10.00  1999 IEEE