A DC to 40 GHz, High Linearity Monolithic GaAs Distributed Amplifier with Low DC Power Consumption as a High Bit-Rate Pre-Driver
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Diego, Laura; Haentjens, Benoit; Mjema, Charles A.; Barrutia, Iban; Herrera, Amparo; Haentjens, Yan
- Source
- 2018 15th European Radar Conference (EuRAD) Radar Conference (EuRAD), 2018 15th European. :497-500 Sep, 2018
- Subject
- Aerospace
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Fields, Waves and Electromagnetics
Signal Processing and Analysis
Transportation
Gallium arsenide
Distributed amplifiers
Gain
Optical amplifiers
Delays
Modulation
Stimulated emission
MMIC
Optical amplifier
Wideband amplifier
Distributed Amplifier
Traveling-wave amplifier
Optical Drives
Optical modulator
electro-optical modulation
LiNbO3 modulator
pre-driver
- Language
This paper presents the design and the performance of a six stage GaAs MMIC distributed amplifier (DA) for optical driver applications. The DA is fabricated in a commercially available 0.15 µm GaAs p-HEMT technology. The amplifier exhibits 13 dB of small gain over 40 GHz of 3 dB bandwidth with a power consumption equal to 550 mW. Group delay time variation up to 30 GHz is only ±7 ps. The output power is higher than 16 dBm (4 Vpp), which makes the circuit suitable as a preamplifier for lithium-niobate (LiNbO3) optical modulator driver. The DA is demonstrated as a part of the modulator driver in a 12.5 GBps PAM-4 (25Gbps) optical system by using the eye diagram as a figure of merit.