Digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with very high conversion rates and bandwidth are of special interest for optical coherent transceiver systems and arbitrary waveform generators. An attractive solution to provide several channels with very high data rates of tens of Gbit/s is to use a high speed serializer. We present a CMOS serializer consisting of a 19 channel 16:1 multiplexer (MUX) for output data rates up to 64 Gbit/s per channel and a low skew clock distribution network.

We present the design of an optical modulator for amplitude modulation in a special silicon-on-insulator technology with 250 nm silicon layer thickness. The design of the modulator is optimized by simulating different parameters like dimension of the structure and doping of the silicon to improve the performance of the device. In addition, a prototype is fabricated and successfully measured to demonstrate the functionality of the technology.

This paper presents a new generalized design methodology based on simplified gain estimations for multi-stage Cherry–Hooper amplifiers. With the proposed approach, a limiting amplifier with 14.6 THz gain-bandwidth-product and 0.5 ps maximum group delay variation is designed.