December 17, 2007 – Silicon Line GmbH introduces a low power 1.5 Gbps transimpedance amplifier with integrated limiting amplifier for silicon photodiodes
Silicon Line GmbH, a German fabless analog IC company, today announced the release of a 1.5 Gigabit per second (Gbps) transimpedance amplifier (TIA) with integrated limiting amplifier. The SL82015 was designed to deliver a high-quality output signal even with the typical frequency characteristics of silicon photodiodes.
With only 9 mW of power dissipation, the TIA is designated for power critical optical data transport applications with respect to various transmission standards. Together with its counterpart, the VCSEL-driver SL82020, and a low threshold VCSEL, the device allows for a robust optical link consuming less than 16 mW for the complete link set-up.
“One more time Silicon Line has proven that it currently leads the market for ultra-low power analog ICs,” said Holger Hoeltke, Managing Director at Silicon Line. “With the emergence of Gigabit data rates in portable electronic systems the power dissipation of analog IC becomes a critical aspect.
Silicon Line has very early recognized this trend and offers today physical layer ICs that consume only a tenth of power compared to their datacom or telecom system relatives”.
The SL82015 features a low input referred noise, which enables a BER of 10-12 at 1.5 Gbps for an input current of 10 µApp. This allows for an optical input sensitivity of about -16 dBm if connected to a typical silicon photodiode.
As additional feature the SL82015 integrates a sophisticated wake-up circuit, which at idle states sets the receiver into “Sleep Mode”-operation with less than 1 µA supply current.
To facilitate assembly in small form factor packages the SL82015 integrates the photodiode filter network on chip.
The SL82015 chip area is less than 0.5 mm² and is available in bare die form.