Design of lower power 4×10Gb/s VCSEL driver array

A 4-channel Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) driver array is designed in a 0.18μm CMOS technology. Simulated results show that each channel works at 10Gb/s (12.5Gb/s max) under a supply voltage of 1.8 V. Thus, aggregated total capacity of 40 Gb/s can be obtained from 4 channels. The power dissipation of each channel is only 50mW. To decrease the fall time of the output waveform, C
³
A (Capacitively Coupled Current Amplifier) technique [1]is exploited. The VCSEL driver can be used in optical inter-connections between high speed chips.