A 500 Mb/s, 20-channel CMOS laser diode array driver for a parallel optical bus

For the ever-increasing demand of communication bandwidth for clustered computer interconnections, parallel optical bus technology provides a small, lightweight, flexible and low-cost alternative to the existing technology. A 20-channel, 500 Mb/s/channel CMOS laser diode (LD) driver drives a vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) array in a parallel optical bus transmitter. It has a 500 Mb/s low voltage differential signal (LVDS) input interface with wide input common mode range. Total data throughput is 10 Gb/s. It uses a standard 3.3 V power supply with 1.6 W of power dissipation, with user features such as on-chip data scrambling and built-in link self-test.