The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is an international effort to construct the world’s largest radio telescope with an effective area of one square kilometer. By their nature signals arriving from astronomical sources are very weak. An SKA receiver therefore will require a wideband high-frequency gain in the order of 70 dB to condition the signals for data processing. This large wideband gain makes the conventional data transfer through coaxial cables problematic as any amount of signal leaking back into the receiver front-end can either overpower the desired signals and desensitize the receiver and/or cause stability issues. Therefore, optical data transfer is desirable and is being considered in this thesis. This thesis presents a study of using CMOS technologies, which are attractive due to their lower costs, higher integration densities, and lower power consumption, to implement an optical transfer for an SKA receiver.

Four different transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs) were designed and experimentally verified in this work. One of these TIAs that employs an immittance converter, which provides both a negative input resistance to increase the input pole frequency and a negative inductance to improve the circuit stability, was chosen as an optical receiver front end. The proposed TIA achieves a 6 GHz 3-dB bandwidth with a 250 fF photodiode capacitance. The transimpedance gain of a single-stage TIA is 54 dBΩ, the group-delay variation and average input-referred noise current are±3 ps and 24 pA/