A 50-Gb/s Optical Transmitter Based on Co-Design of a 45-nm CMOS SOI Distributed Driver and 90-nm Silicon Photonic Mach-Zehnder Modulator

This paper presents an integrated optical driver and Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) that operates to 50 Gb/s. The MZM consists of 4 traveling wave segments along a 3.2 mm length in a 90-nm Silicon Photonic (SiP) technology. The broadband distributed amplifier is a pseudo-differential design with 3-stack driver stages to deliver sufficient voltage swing in a 45nm CMOS SOI technology. The optical eye is open to 50 Gb/s and indicates error-free operation to 30 Gb/s. The total circuit consumes 480 mW.