INTEGRATED WIDE-BAND CMOS DUOBINARY TRANSMITTER FOR OPTICAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

Inter symbol interference (ISI) caused by dispersion in optical fibers is the major limiting factor on the achievable data rate or transmission distance in high-speed fiber-optic interconnects¹. Compared with optical-domain and other electrical-domain dispersion compensation methods, duobinary coding technology is used due to its higher spectral efficiency. In this paper, a monolithically integrated duobinary optical transmitter has be designed and fabricated in standard 0.18 μm CMOS technology. This transmitter consists of a duobinary encoder and a VCSEL driver. The master-slave D flip-flop structure is used to generate the wideband one bit delay which is important for the realization of duobinary signal. An open drain structure is used in VCSEL driver design to provide the higher current output in low supply voltage condition. This duobinary transmitter can operate up to 5 Gb/s with 20 mA current output. The current consumption is only 50 mA under 1.8 V supply voltage.