45% Power Saving in a 0.25/spl mu/m BiCMOS 10Gb/s 50/spl Omega/-Terminated Packaged Active-Load Laser Driver

A 0.25μm BiCMOS laser driver based on active loads allows operation at 10Gb/s while drawing 5mA from a 1.8V supply. The design guarantees the correct matching of the driver outputs without the use of physical 50Omega load resistors. This enables a theoretical current consumption reduction of 50% (45% in the actual prototype) compared to the traditional laser-driver design.