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 1016 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 × 180 μm2 layout area and about 170 mW predicted power consumption at 500 Mrad. The ASIC has been submitted to foundry in May 2018.