A 54-mW 8-Gbit/s VCSEL driver in a 65-nm CMOS technology

We report a VCSEL driver ASIC designed and fabricated in a commercial 65-nm CMOS process. At 8 Gbps, the eye diagram passes the eye mask test and the bit-error-rate is less than 10−12 at the 95% confidence level. The total power consumption (including VCSEL) is about 54 mW, less than 1/4 of our previous VCSEL driver ASIC in a silicon-on-sapphire CMOS technology. The VCSEL driver has been tested in a neutron beam with the maximum energy of 800 MeV and the cross section has been estimated to be less than 3.14 × 10−11 cm2.