Towards a sub-2.5V, 100-Gb/s Serial Transceiver

Abstract

This paper describes first a half-rate, 2.5-V, 1.4-W, 87-Gb/s transmitter with on-chip PLL fabricated in a production 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS process. Next, the most critical blocks required for the implementation of a full-rate 100-Gb/s serial transceiver are explored. State-of-the art 105-GHz, SiGe HBT static frequency dividers and VCOs operating from 2.5-V supply, as well as 65-nm CMOS, 1.2-V, 90-GHz static frequency dividers, low-phase noise VCOs, and 100-GHz clock distribution network amplifiers are fully characterized over power supply and process spread, and over temperature up to 100°C. Inductor and transformer modeling and scaling beyond 200 GHz in nanoscale CMOS and SiGe BiCMOS technologies, are also described.