A COMPARATIVE-STUDY OF INTEGRATED PHOTORECEIVERS USING MSM HEMT AND PIN/HEMT TECHNOLOGIES/

An experimental comparative study of PIN/HEMT and MSM/HEMT monolithica lly integrated photoreceivers for high-speed long-wavelength telecommu nications systems is presented. The monolithic integration of the phot odetector (either MSM or PIN) with the HEMT used a stacked layer struc ture design grown by OMVPE. Detector areas and amplifier feedback resi stances were selected to result in similar bandwidths and responsiviti es for both the MSM- and PIN-based photoreceivers. Sensitivities for t he MSM/HEMT photoreceivers were measured to be -16.9 dBm and -10.7 dBm at 5 Gb/s and 10 Gb/s, respectively for a bit-error ratio (BER) of 10 (-9) and 2(7) -1 pattern length PRBS data. Corresponding performance f or the PIN/HEMT photoreceivers was -18.4 and -15.8 dBm. To the author' s knowledge, this is the first direct experimental comparison of MSM-a nd PIN-based technologies for high-speed monolithic photoreceiver appl ications.