Design Of A High Radiation-Hard Driver For Mach-Zehnder Modulators Based High-Speed Links For Hadron Collider Applications

This work presents a design of a driver in 65 nm TSMC technology for a custom MZM designed to withstand non-ionizing energy losses (NIEL) of up few 10(16) n/cm(2) and up to 500 Mrad total ionization doses (TID). The design of the driver is optimized for a TID exceeding 500 Mrad, for a target bit rate of 10 Gbps. The driver uses a CML (Current Mode Logic) architecture. A cascode architecture is adopted in the last stage to increase the driving voltage. Two driver designs have been implemented, the largest sizing 347 x 180 mu m(2) layout area and about 170 mW predicted power consumption at 500 Mrad. The ASIC has been submitted to foundry in May 2018.