A 22nm CMOS 15-25GHz Dual-Differential Driver for RF Silicon Photonic Front-End

An RF photonic front-end using dual-differential driving scheme is reported with a 22 nm CMOS FD-SOI driver co-integrated with a silicon traveling-wave Mach-Zehnder modulator. A compact design of power splitter and output routing network are implemented on dual-differential driver. An LC input matching network co-designed with bond wire inductance is implemented on a photonic chip to complete the output matching network. The proposed driver is verified with S-parameter and two-tone measurements, achieving <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$15-25 \text{GHz}$</tex> bandwidth with peak 3 dBm IIP3 and consumes 448 mW. The link performance is demonstrated <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{1 2. 1 \%}$</tex> EVM of 16-QAM modulation with 2Gbd at 20 GHz carrier frequency.