Transfer Printable 64 Gbps Lumped Driver for Optical Communication

Abstract:
This paper presents design and performance comparison of two drivers implemented one in the standard IHP SG13G2 technology and the other in the transfer printable technology based on IHP SG13G2, but lacking of the topmost metal layer and with thinner substrate. For a fair comparison, both drivers utilize the same topology. The design of compact inductors enables with 20 µm x 20 µm size to have a core area lower than 200 µm x 300 µm. Small signal measurements of the drivers resulted in very similar performance, revealing 17 dB DC gain on both chips with only 10 GHz bandwidth degradation in transfer printable design. The extracted group delay variation of the designs are low as 2.5 ps and 3.7 ps. The measured eye diagrams at 64 Gb/s prove the performance of the drivers. Both drivers present outstanding performance in terms of gain, bandwidth and power consumption, resulting in a GBP/PDC which is almost two times larger than the one presented by other designs, occupying a very limited silicon area, strongly supporting the use of transfer printing for packaging high performance lumped drivers for optical communication systems.