Design of a 10 Gb/s Laser Diode Voltage Driver in 0.18 um CMOS technology

This paper describes the design of a 10 Gb/s Laser Diode Voltage Driver (LDVD) circuit using 0.18 um CMOS technology. The LDVD circuit consists of input buffer stage, preamplifier stage and output driver stage. The LDVD uses dual power supplies, including the 1.8 V supply in the pre-amplifier stage and the 3.5 V supply in the output driver stage. In order to increase the bandwidth, the pre-amplifier stage is made up of two-stage cascaded differential amplifiers. The output driver circuit uses the C³A structure to speed up the turnoff of laser diode. Post simulation results show that the Laser Diode Voltage Driver can work at 12.5 Gb/s rate and the output current swing is over 10 mA. The power dissipation is 142mW and the chip area is 440 um × 470 um.