A Low Power CMOS Driver Integrated with Mach-Zehnder Modulator for PAM4 Optical Transmissions
Journal
2020 50th European Microwave Conference, EuMC 2020
Pages
328-331
Date Issued
2021
Author(s)
Abstract
In this paper, we design a wideband driver in 65nm CMOS and integrate with the MZM (Mach-Zehnder Modulator) and bias network to demonstrate high speed electrical-optical (EO) conversion. The driver uses DA (distributed amplifier) topology with stacked-FET cell to achieve more than 23 GHz bandwidth. The issue of breakdown tolerance and bandwidth is much improved by introducing the LPN (low pass network) with stack-FET. Also, the proposed driver adopts a different bias scheme to improve the power efficiency of traditional DA. A transmission efficiency of 15.96 pJ/bit is achieved with a total 734 mW power consumption. The NRZ and PAM4 signals can reach 32 Gb/s and 25 Gbaud/s with more than 5V and 3.8V differential amplitudes respectively by electrical measurements. With integration of MZM, the proposed design demonstrates operating speed of 25Gb/s with 5.41dB extinction ratio (ER) and 23 Gbaud/s with 3.78 ER for NRZ and PAM4 signals, respectively. ? 2021 EuMA.
Subjects
Bandwidth; Broadband amplifiers; CMOS integrated circuits; Energy efficiency; Integrated circuit design; Light modulation; Light transmission; Optical signal processing; Pulse amplitude modulation; Distributed amplifier; Electrical measurement; Extinction ratios; Low-pass networks; Mach Zehnder modulator; Operating speed; Power efficiency; Transmission efficiency; Light modulators
SDGs
Type
conference paper