10 Gb/s Energy-efficient Optical Transceiver using 1060 nm HCG MEMS-tunable VCSEL in 28 nm FD-SOI Technology

The 28 nm FD-SOI CMOS technology was proven to be faster and more power efficient due to greater control of the threshold voltage of transistors. An optical transceiver was designed in this node for a 1060 nm HCG MEMS-tunable VCSEL to transmit information at a higher data rate and reduced energy consumption. The transmitter block is composed of a binary-to-thermometer encoder and CA cascode driver slices. The PAM-4 modulation scheme was used to directly modulate the VCSEL, and a multimode fiber (OM5) that can transmit the required data rate was modeled. For the receiver block, a RCG TIA was used followed by a decoder to recover the input bit streams. The optical transceiver designed and implemented achieved the required data rate of 10 Gb/s, an approximate BER of $10^{-15}$, energy efficiency of 0.785 pJ/bit, and an eye diagram containing three clear eyes, each with a peak-to-peak voltage of greater than 70 mV.