A Low-Power High-BW PAM4 VCSEL Driver With Three-Tap FFE in 12-nm CMOS FinFET Pr

Abstract

This work presents a low-power high-bandwidth (BW) PAM4 VCSEL transmitter. We introduce a new cascode voltage-mode (VM) driver to provide a larger output modulation current while using smaller devices and lower power consumption compared to the conventional VM driver. This improves the power efficiency and relaxes the self-loading concern in the conventional designs. The driver also includes an asymmetric three-tap feedforward equalizer (FFE) for MSB and LSB to effectively compensate for the BW