A Fully Integrated 20-Gb/s Optoelectronic Transceiver Implemented in a Standard 0.13-$\mu{\hbox {m}}$ CMOS SOI Technology

Fundamental characteristics and high-speed applications of carrier-depletion silicon Mach-Zehnder modulators

“…Carrier depletion in reverse-biased PN junction is effective to induce fast carrier displacement for high-speed modulation at symbol rates beyond 10 Gbaud [11]. Carrierdepletion Si MZ modulators incorporating lateral PN-junction phase shifters were fabricated using CMOS-compatible fabrication processes on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers [12]. The lateral PN-junction carrier-depletion Si MZ modulators have an advantage in phase-shift keying (PSK) over the other types of Si MZ modulators because of weak phase nonlinearity on modulation voltage with negligible carrierinduced intensity modulation [13].…”

A 5 VPP Differential Output Swing MZI Driver Amplifier in 65 nm CMOS for Optoelectronic Applications

“…As a result, in order to produce same extinction ratio, the driving circuit for MZI modulators should have higher voltage swing compared to laser diode drivers [1] and at the same time should also satisfy the high switching speed requirements. To achieve these specifications, MZI modulator based driver circuits employ III-V, Bi-CMOS or Si-Ge technologies leveraging their high mobility and high breakdown voltage devices [2]- [5]. However, these technologies require specialized processes, expensive packaging and assembly.…”

“…However, the scaling of device technology and consequently, reduced supply voltages make the realization of high speed and high output swing driver circuit increasingly challenging. In this paper, we developed a driver amplifier in 65nm CMOS to produce differential output voltage swing of greater than 5 VPP with a supply voltage of 4 V. The driver incorporates a drain-gate feedback network that allows usage of regular and thick gate MOS devices to achieve data rates as high as 10 Gb/s. Section 2 provides a system overview of the MZI modulator based driver IC along with its design requirements.…”

“…The transmitter converts high speed electrical input data into an optical signal with the help of a driver amplifier and an optical modulator (MZI). The MZI consists of two arms, and operates on the principle of electro-optic effect such that the light passed through the two arms is phase shifted due to the free carrier dispersion induced by the electric potential applied to the modulator substrate of each branch [5]. Since the two arms are differentially excited, when the light passing through them is combined, it undergoes constructive or destructive interference to obtain intensity modulated optical output.…”

“…This is achieved by a high voltage swing driver designed in this work as shown in A two stage predriver operating at 1.2V supply generates the necessary input swing required by the main driver circuit. Although single chip integration of the modulator and the driver has already been reported [5], they use specialized silicon on insulator (SOI) process to accommodate the driver and the modulator on the same chip. To avoid process complexity and expensive packaging, we developed the driver IC on a separate chip that can be directly wire bonded to the MZI chip while both the driver IC and the modulator chip are mounted on a PCB.…”