444 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 26, NO.

5, MARCH 1, 2014

A Fully Integrated Radio-Fiber Interface

in 65 nm CMOS Technology
Waqas Ahmad, Student Member, IEEE, Markus Törmänen, Senior Member, IEEE,
and Henrik Sjöland, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract— In this letter, we present a fully integrated radio-

fiber interface implemented in 65-nm CMOS, intended for remote
antenna units (RAUs) in distributed antenna systems. To relax
the requirements on the optical components, an intermediate
frequency signal (100 MHz) is transmitted over the multimode
fiber, which is then up-converted to 2.2 GHz inside the RAU.
Local oscillator (LO) signals to the mixers are generated by an
on-chip frequency synthesizer. The measured optical to electrical
conversion gain (V /W )√is 59 dB, whereas the input referred
current noise is 3.5pA/ Hz and SFDR is 96.5 dB · Hz2/3 . An LO
leakage of −40 dBc and an image rejection ratio of 43 dB is
measured. The circuit achieves an adjacent channel leakage ratio
of −39 and −41 dB, for a 10-MHz 32 quadrature amplitude
modulation signal at output power of 1 dBm, and a 3.84-MHz
quadrature phase shift keying signal at 4 dBm, respectively.
Index Terms— CMOS technology, CMOS photodiodes, CMOS
photodetectors, multi-mode fiber (MMF), radio over fiber,
vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL).
I. I NTRODUCTION
F IBER-FED distributed antenna systems (DAS) are very
attractive due to the advantages offered by the fiber
such as low loss, high bandwidth and interference free RF
signal transmission. To implement the DAS in a cost-effective
manner, Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELs)
and multi-mode fibers (MMFs) can be used. In [1] it has
been demonstrated that VCSELs can have excellent linearity
performance, close to that of distributed feedback (DFB) and
Fabry-Perot lasers. High signal quality was reported in [2], [3]
while transmitting WLAN, GSM-1800 and WCDMA signals
over MMFs using VCSELs.
While the use of MMFs and VCSELs provide important cost
reductions, to make the complete system cost-effective, RAUs
must also be made low cost. The use of a standard CMOS
technology enables both low cost and compact size through
high integration, but the performance of CMOS photodiodes is
a major bottleneck. In [4], however, an avalanche photodiode
(APD) manufactured in 180 nm CMOS technology is used
in an RAU to receive WLAN signals, and in [5] a circuit
Manuscript received October 1, 2013; revised December 6, 2013; accepted
December 16, 2013. Date of publication December 20, 2013; date of current
version January 31, 2014. This work was performed within the project
distributed antenna systems (DISTRANT), which is supported by the Swedish
Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF).
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Information
Technology, Lund Institute of Technology, Lund 223 63, Sweden (e-mail:
waqas.ahmad@eit.lth.se; markus.tormanen@eit.lth.se; henrik.sjoland@eit.
lth.se).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2013.2295629
1041-1135 © 2013 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Fig. 1. Block diagram of the low cost, CMOS integrated RAU.
in 0.25 um BiCMOS technology is demonstrated for 60 GHz
wireless links also using an APD. While APDs offer high
bandwidth and responsivity, they unfortunately require very
high reverse bias voltage (>10V). The nominal supply voltage
in a 65nm CMOS technology is just 1.2 V, so the reliability of
APDs in such a process under high reverse bias voltage is still
to be investigated. Furthermore APDs tend to generate excess
noise due to their random amplification process.
Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of the low cost and fully
integrated RAU intended for fiber-fed distributed antenna
systems. We used a standard n-well/p-sub photodiode instead
of an APD. The −3 dB bandwidth of such a photodiode in
65 nm CMOS technology is just 6 MHz with a roll-off of
about 5−6 dB/decade [6]. We take advatange of this slow
roll-off and distribute the signal at an intermediate frequency
(IF), here 100 MHz, and perform the frequency up-conversion
inside the RAU. Although it increases the complexity of
the RAU, there are several advantages with this approach
compared to distribution directly at RF. The sensitivity of
the RAU will be 7−8 dB higher when using a standard
CMOS photodiode. Furthermore, the loss in the MMF will
be lower for signal distribution at IF. It has also been shown
in literature [2] that for analog signal transmission over MMF,
the EVM performance of the link is directly related to the fiber
bandwidth (MHz·km), which means that for a given EVM
requirement an IF link can be much longer than an RF link.
Together with the modulated signal a reference signal for
the frequency synthesizer is also transmitted over the fiber.
In the RAU the frequency reference signal is separated from
the modulated signal by appropriate filtering. It is then used
by the frequency synthesizer to generate the local oscillator
(LO) signal for the mixers. All RAUs present in the DAS
can now be locked to the same frequency reference, which is
important to the performance of a multi-antenna system. The
up-converted signal is further amplified by an off-chip power
amplifier.

Authorized licensed use limited to: Universita degli Studi di Bologna. Downloaded on January 23,2021 at 10:17:33 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
AHMAD et al.: FULLY INTEGRATED RADIO-FIBER INTERFACE
Fig. 2. Block diagram of the radio-fiber interface IC and the die photo.
In this letter, as an initial step, we demonstrate a radio-
fiber interface circuit which will be part of the fully integrated
RAU shown in Fig. 1. In this design a 131.25 MHz electrical
reference signal is used for the PLL instead of being fed
through the fiber. The circuit is manufactured using standard
ST Microelctronics 65 nm CMOS process and occupies just
0.8 mm2 of chip area, including bondpads.
II. I MPLEMENTATION
The block diagram of the radio-fiber interface circuit
together with the manufactured chip microphotograph is
shown in Fig. 2. A standard n-well/p-substrate photodiode
with 29 n-well fingers was designed, the width of each finger
being 1.5 um. The diameter of the photodiode is 60 um suitable
for receiving light from the MMF. The simulated parasitic
capacitance is 1.5 pF at 1.2 V reverse bias. The photodiode has
a measured DC responsivity of 0.121 A/W, while the −3 dB
frequency is only 6 MHz [6]. The frequency response of the
photodiode, however, rolls off quite slowly (5−6 dB/decade),
making it usable at frequencies upto several hundred MHz.
The responsivity of the photodiode at 100 MHz is 0.040 A/W.
The photodiode is ac-coupled to the transimpedance amplifier
(TIA), which is based on a shunt-shunt feedback topology,
where the transimpedance is set by a feedback resistor
of 8 k. A three stage topology is used to implement the
inverting amplifier. A cascode amplifier is used in the first
stage to reduce the Miller effect, and the other two stages are
common source amplifiers with resistive loads. The simulated
bandwidth of the TIA exceeds 500 MHz. The single-ended
signal from the TIA is converted to differential by an active
balun, implemented as a resistively loaded common source
amplifier with resistive source degeneration, where the input
is applied at the gate and output is taken from the source and
drain terminals.
For single-sideband (SSB) up-conversion quadrature phases
are needed for both the IF and LO signals. The IF signal
is converted to quadrature by using a passive poly-phase
filter (PPF). The required bandwidth over which high image
rejection is required is about 20 MHz, centered at 100 MHz, so
a three stage stagger-tuned PPF filter was designed. Capacitors
of 500 fF were used in all stages, while the resistance was
increased going from the input stage to the output. The signals
after the PPF are amplified to compensate for the filter losses.
A passive voltage mode mixer driven by 25% duty cycle
LO signals is used for frequency up-conversion [7]. The size
of the switch transistors was optimized for low noise and
limited power consumption in the LO buffer. The pre-PA was
implemented as an open drain differential cascode amplifier
Authorized licensed use limited to: Universita degli Studi di Bologna. Downloaded on January 23,2021 at 10:17:33 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
445
Fig. 3. Measurement setup.
Fig. 4. Measured one-tone output spectrum [RBW = 100 kHz,
VBW = 300 Hz].
driving the external 50  load and its bias was provided
through an external bias-Tee.
An on-chip integer-N phase locked loop (PLL) is used to
generate a 4.2 GHz signal, which is further divided by two in
the LO generator to create the quadrature LO signals with 25%
duty cycle required by the mixer. The PLL consists of a phase
frequency detector (PFD), charge pump, loop filter, LC voltage
controlled oscillator (VCO), and a frequency divider. The
bandwidth of the PLL is about 500 kHz. The mixer switches
are driven by an LO buffer.
III. M EASUREMENTS
The chip was directly glued on an FR-4 printed circuit
board (PCB) and all signals were wire-bonded. All losses
were carefully de-embedded, except for the PCB losses that
are included in the measurement results. A supply voltage of
1.2 V was used for the entire chip except the pre-PA, which
used 1.8 V. The photodiode reverse bias was set to 1.2 V. The
total power consumption was 89 mW, of which the pre-PA
consumed 65 mW. The PLL consumed 8.6 mW, whereas the
LO generator and LO buffer consumed 4.8 mW and 4 mW,
respectively, and the TIA, active balun and PPF consumed
6.6 mW. The optical measurement setup is shown in Fig. 3,
where the light from a Finisar VCSEL (HFE4192-581) was
coupled into a 2 meter long MMF with a core diameter of
50 um. A dual lens focuser from OZ Optics was used to focus
the light onto the chip. The focuser creates a spot-size of about
50 um at 4.3 mm working distance. The laser was modulated
directly by a signal generator (R&S SMIQ 06B) and DC bias
current was fed using a bias-Tee. The peak to peak optical
power (W pk− pk ) at the output of the fiber was deduced by
measuring the DC optical power around the operating point
of the laser using a power meter, where the bias was changed
according to the modulation voltage. The optical power was
calculated as 10 × log(1000 × 0.5 × W pk− pk ). Insertion loss
in the focuser (0.2 dB) was neglected. The electrical output
signal was measured using a spectrum analyzer (R&S FSU).
446
Fig. 5. O/E conversion gain and output power versus input optical power.
Fig. 6. Measured output spectrum (a) 3.84 MHz QPSK modulated signal
at Pout = 4 dBm. (b) 10 MHz 32 QAM signal at Pout = 1 dBm [RBW =
50 kHz, VBW = 300 Hz].
Fig. 4 shows the measured single tone transmission test result.
At 5 dBm output power, LO leakage is about −40 dBc and the
image is −43 dBc. The image rejection ratio of 43 dB means
a quadrature accuracy of better than 1° and 1% in phase and
amplitude, respectively. The measured electrical output power
versus input optical power is plotted in Fig. 5. The output
referred 1 dB compression point is about 6 dBm and optical to
electrical (O/E) conversion gain is 59 dB (V/W). The laser has
a specified average optical power of −4 dBm and it can be seen
that output power start to compress at the same input level.
√ [4] H.-S. Kang, M.-J. Lee, and W.-Y. Choi, “Low-cost multistandard
The measured input referred current noise is 3.5pA/ Hz.
A two tone test with a tone spacing of 5 MHz was performed
to measure the linearity. At an average output power of
3.3 dBm, the third order inter-modulation products (IM3)
are 33 dB below the fundamental tones, which corresponds
to an output referred third order intercept point (OIP3) of
+17 dBm. When a 4.5 dB optical attenuator was used at the
output of the laser, the difference between the fundamental
and third order intermodulation products (IM3) increased by
Authorized licensed use limited to: Universita degli Studi di Bologna. Downloaded on January 23,2021 at 10:17:33 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 26, NO. 5, MARCH 1, 2014
16 dB instead of the ideal 18 dB, which means that at this
input power level, the IM3 slope is not 3 dB/dB. However,
we can conclude that the non-linearities of the VCSEL are
not dominant. The spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) of
the circuit is 96.5 dB·Hz2/3 . Furthermore, adjacent channel
leakage ratio (ACLR) was measured by applying modulated
signals. The circuit was tested with a Quadrature Phase Shift
Keying (QPSK) modulated signal having peak to average
power ratio (PAPR) of 5.8 dB and a Quadrature Amplitude
Modulation (32 QAM) signal with a PAPR of 6.9 dB. Fig. 6(a)
shows the measured spectrum with QPSK modulated signal,
which has an ACLR of −41 dB at an average output power
of 4 dBm, where the signal bandwidth is 3.84 MHz and
the channel bandwidth is 5 MHz. Fig. 6(b) shows the output
spectrum with the 32 QAM signal having an ACLR of −39 dB
at an average power of 1 dBm, where the signal bandwidth is
10 MHz and the channel bandwidth is 14 MHz. The measured
phase noise of the PLL is −110 dBc/Hz and −145 dBc/Hz
at 1 MHz and 20 MHz offset, respectively. The reference spur
level at the PLL output was −58 dBc. The phase noise and
spurs were measured at 4.2 GHz so the actual phase noise
performance at 2.1 GHz is expected to be 6 dB better after
division by 2.
IV. C ONCLUSION
We have presented a CMOS integrated radio-fiber interface
circuit targeted towards low cost RAUs for RoF links based on
VCSELs and MMFs. To circumvent the limited bandwidth of
CMOS photodiodes and the relatively high attenuation in the
MMF at high frequencies, signals modulated on a 100 MHz
carrier are transmitted over the fiber and converted to radio
frequency inside the RAU. The measured results indicate that
this approach has a great potential for realizing low cost
remote antenna units, and future work will focus on realizing
the entire RAU on a CMOS chip.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank ST Microelectronics for
supporting the chip fabrication.
R EFERENCES
[1] R. V. Dalal, R. Ram, R. Helkey, H. Roussell, and K. Choquette, “Low
distortion analogue signal transmission using vertical cavity lasers,”
Electron. Lett., vol. 34, no. 16, pp. 1590–1591, 1998.
[2] M. Y. W. Chia, B. Luo, M. L. Yee, and E. J. Z. Hao, “Radio
over multimode fibre transmission for wireless LAN using VCSELs,”
Electron. Lett., vol. 39, no. 15, pp. 1143–1144, 2003.
[3] R. Schuh, A. Alping, and E. Sundberg, “Penalty-free GSM-1800
and WCDMA radio-over-fibre transmission using multimode fibre and
850 nm VCSEL,” Electron. Lett., vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 512–514, 2003.
radio-over-fiber downlinks based on CMOS-compatible Si avalanche
photodetectors,” IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 21, no. 7,
pp. 462–464, Apr. 1, 2009.
[5] M. Ko, J.-S. Youn, M.-J. Lee, K.-C. Choi, H. Rucker, and W.-Y. Choi,
“Silicon photonics-wireless interface IC for 60-GHz wireless link,” IEEE
Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 24, no. 13, pp. 1112–1114, Jul. 1, 2012.
[6] W. Ahmad, M. Törmänen, and H. Sjöland, “Photodiodes in deep
submicron CMOS process for fully differential optical receivers,” in
Proc. Eur. Solid-State Device Res. Conf., 2013, pp. 135–138.
[7] X. He and J. van Sinderen, “A low-power, low-EVM, SAW-less
WCDMA transmitter using direct quadrature voltage modulation,” IEEE
J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 44, no. 12, pp. 3448–3458, Dec. 2009.