A Fully Differential, Wide Band, 4-Stacked RF Driver for Photonic Modulators

Abstract

Advanced sub-micrometer technologies are suffering from the low breakdown voltage of the devices, which makes it hard to achieve high-power and high-frequency RF drivers. To overcome these limitations, power combining techniques are developed to combine the power over multiple stages, such as the transistor stacking technique. This work presents an ultra-wide-band, fully differential stacked RF driver. In comparison to other conventional RF drivers, the stacked driver allows higher output voltage swing and larger output power. The proposed design, prototyped in Global Foundry 22nm FDSOI CMOS technology, shows a 0.4-17.4 GHz bandwidth, with a 20 dB gain. More than 16 dBm output power is achieved at 10 GHz, with 17.6 dBm saturation power. Overall, the driver consumes 288 mW, differential, from a 3.2 V supply and occupies 0.167 mm˄2.