Design investigation to improve voltage swing and bandwidth of the SiGe driver circuit for a silicon electro-optic ring modulator

摘要

This paper reports on a new SiGe driver IC to address the low breakdownvoltage level of modern BiCMOS transistors. An optical modulator driver ICin SiGe 250 nm technology with a supply voltage of 4.5 V is presented. Thisdriver IC consists of pre- and main driver stages where a newly modifiedcascode topology and capacitance degeneration technique is employed to meetcurrent application requirements; high voltage swing at high datarate. Thesimulation results show a differential output voltage swing of 3.9 Vp-p at14 Gbps data rate, according to the FDR Infiniband standard.