BROADBAND STACKED DRIVER IN SIGE:C130 NM BICMOS TECHNOLOGY FOR HIGH SPEED OPTICAL TRANSCEIVERS

Abstract

In this work, design and simulation of a broadband stacked distributed power amplifier in SiGe:C BiCMOS 130nm technology, is presented. The proposed broadband stacked distributed driver amplifier (SDDA) consists of a unit—stack implemented in distributed topology. The SDDA deploys four sections of unit—stacks with each unit—stack comprising of three devices in the stack. The unit stack is responsible for generating large output voltage swings at the top of the stack while the device sizes in the stack are kept same in order to have same increment in the output impedance. The uniform distributed topology is preferred to implement the SDDA. Small-signal simulations of the proposed design demonstrate more than 120GHz of bandwidth with minimum of 19dB gain throughout the band. The input and output return losses are better than 7 dB. Further, only ±4 group delay variation is simulated throughout the driver bandwidth. Simulations show that the total harmonic distortion (THD) of 10% is achieved close to the saturated output power level of the SDDA. The time-domain performance of the SDDA has been evaluated through eye diagram simulations with pseudo-random binary sequence (PRBS). Simulated eye diagrams suggest an operation with open eye diagrams up to 200Gbps with driver biased under supply voltages of 4.5V.