This paper focuses on the investigation of integrated CMOS and Silicon/Germanium (SiGe) devices for highspeed optical receiver circuits. In this paper, we present several competitive designs of front-end transimpedance amplifiers (TIA) for optical receiver applications using the IBM 5HP (0.5 micron) SiGe technology. This technology exhibits f/sub T/ and f/sub MAX/ of 47 GHz and 65 GHz respectively. Spectre simulations in the Cadence Affirma analog design environment are conducted for both the TIA's and a complete receiver circuit consisting of a TIA, a cascaded multi-stage differential amplifier and a multi-stage inverting amplifier at the single supply voltage of 3.3 V. We also discuss the practicality of using SiGe based photodetectors for 1.3-1.5 /spl mu/m wavelength light and the use of Neolinear's NeoCircuit/NeoCell mixed signal design tools for optimization of the analog circuits.