A compact picosecond pulsed laser source using a fully integrated CMOS driver circuit

Yuting He; Yuhua Li; Orly Yadid-Pecht

doi:10.1117/12.2211812

3 March 2016 A compact picosecond pulsed laser source using a fully integrated CMOS driver circuit

Yuting He, Yuhua Li, Orly Yadid-Pecht

Proceedings Volume 9751, Smart Photonic and Optoelectronic Integrated Circuits XVIII; 97511B (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2211812
Event: SPIE OPTO, 2016, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

Picosecond pulsed laser source have applications in areas such as optical communications, biomedical imaging and supercontinuum generation. Direct modulation of a laser diode with ultrashort current pulses offers a compact and efficient approach to generate picosecond laser pulses. A fully integrated complementary metaloxide- semiconductor (CMOS) driver circuit is designed and applied to operate a 4 GHz distributed feedback laser (DFB). The CMOS driver circuit combines sub-circuits including a voltage-controlled ring oscillator, a voltagecontrolled delay line, an exclusive-or (XOR) circuit and a current source circuit. Ultrashort current pulses are generated by the XOR circuit when the delayed square wave is XOR’ed with the original square wave from the on-chip oscillator. Circuit post-layout simulation shows that output current pulses injected into an equivalent circuit load of the laser have a pulse full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 200 ps, a peak current of 80 mA and a repetition rate of 5.8 MHz. This driver circuit is designed in a 0.13 μm CMOS process and taped out on a 0.3 mm² chip area. This CMOS chip is packaged and interconnected with the laser diode on a printed circuit board (PCB). The optical output waveform from the laser source is captured by a 5 GHz bandwidth photodiode and an 8 GHz bandwidth oscilloscope. Measured results show that the proposed laser source can output light pulses with a pulse FWHM of 151 ps, a peak power of 6.4 mW (55 mA laser peak forward current) and a repetition rate of 5.3 MHz.

Citation Download Citation

Yuting He, Yuhua Li, and Orly Yadid-Pecht "A compact picosecond pulsed laser source using a fully integrated CMOS driver circuit", Proc. SPIE 9751, Smart Photonic and Optoelectronic Integrated Circuits XVIII, 97511B (3 March 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2211812

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