Broadband 65nm CMOS SOI LNA for a 100Gbit/s fiber-optic SCM transceiver

The suitability of the ST Microelectronics 65nm CMOS LP SOI process on HR substrate for a 100Gbit/s fiber-optic SCM transceiver LNA is examined in this paper. A broadband single stage and three stage LNA, using requirements derived from system simulations, were designed with bandwidths from 2GHz to 40GHz and 2GHz to 26GHz at gains of 5dB and 15dB respectively. A noise figure of similar to 5-7dB was obtained. Although the LNA noise figure is not as good, when compared to LNAs designed using other semiconductor technologies, it is still sufficient to be considered for the application, and has the advantage that it can be integrated with complex digital and analog baseband CMOS circuits.