Abstract

The progress of long wavelength lightwave communications towards higher data rates has spurred research in the field of high speed photonic and electronic devices. In particular, at speeds beyond several gigabits per second, optoelectronic integrated circuits (OEICs) have been actively researched in several laboratories, motivated by the potential benefits of monolithic integration. The photoreceiver, incorporating a photodetector followed by preamplifier electronics, has been the most widely investigated. Monolithic photoreceivers with multi-gigabit speeds and with sensitivities close to the best hybrid ones have been reported [1-3]. We have been investigating the bipolar transistor in the InP/InGaAs material system, namely, the heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT), as a very promising electronic device for high speed OEICs in general and receivers in particular. We reported a p-i-n/HBT photoreceiver operating at 4 Gb/s using metal organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE)-grown material [4] and a similar high performance receiver operating up to 5 Gb/s using chemical beam epitaxy (CBE)-grown material [5]. In this paper, we report on a very high speed monolithic photoreceiver fabricated from InP/InGaAs heterostructures grown by metal organic molecular beam epitaxy (MOMBE). We demonstrate successful operation of this photoreceiver at 10 Gb/s with a performance close to the best p-i-n hybrid receiver at this bit rate.

© 1992 Optical Society of America