A Compact Low-Power Driver Array for VCSELs in 65-nm CMOS Technology

This paper presents a compact low-power 4 × 10 Gb/s quad-driver module for vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) arrays in a 65-nm CMOS technology. The side-by-side drivers can be directly wire bonded to the VCSEL diode array, supporting up to four channels. To increase the bandwidth of the driver, an internal feed-forward path is added for pole-zero cancellation, without increasing the power consumption. An edge-configurable pre-emphasis technique is adopted to achieve high bandwidth and minimize the asymmetry of the fall and rise times of the driver output current. Measurement results demonstrate an rms jitter of 0.68 ps for 10 Gb/s operation. Tests demonstrate negligible crosstalk between channels. Under irradiation, the modulation amplitude degrades less than 5% up to 300-Mrad ionizing dose. The area of the quad-driver array is 500 μm by 1000 μm, and the total power consumption for the entire driver array chip is 130 mW for typical current setting.