Low noise, wide bandwidth transimpedance amplifier design for optical applications

In recent years sensor applications take a very important role in the electronics industry. Sensor applications receive signals from the surrounding which needs to be analyzed. These signals are usually very low, especially in the optical systems the current generated from a photodiode, photomultiplier tubes. Amplifiers and analog front-end circuits are taking very important roles to analyze low-level sensor signals. Also, since most of the signal processing occurs in the voltage domain. Those low-level current signals should be converted to a voltage signal. The current to voltage amplifiers are used to convert the low current signal to voltage. These amplifiers are also called transimpedance amplifiers. The main purpose of this thesis is to design a low noise, wide bandwidth transimpedance amplifier for optical spectroscopy applications. Existing commercial wideband TIA solutions are very expensive. In this thesis, a wide-band, low noise and low-cost transismpedance amplifier have designed. Attention was given to PCB design rules, multilayer PCB stack-ups rules and component selection while doing this design. Reached a 20 dB gain between 0–400 MHz with designed analog circuit block. At the end of this thesis, it is seen that 4 layers transimpedance amplifier design is more effective and it produces more gain at high frequencies than 2 layer design.