IC Design

Electronic Integrated Circuits

In fiber-optical communication systems the driver and control electronic for the electro-optical devices are becoming increasingly important to achieve lower power consumption and higher speed.

Co-designed optic and electronic devices are therefore a logical step to access additional optimization parameters to further improve performance.

These IC's will be designed in appropriate material systems like BiCMOS, CMOS or InP.

As an example, the IC-Design group developed a special, impedance engineered low power driver in BiCMOS technology, specifically adapted to the needs of our high speed InP based Mach-Zehnder- and IQ-Modulators.

With this approach a MZM driver with a low power consumption as low as 185 mW could be achieved for a bit rate of 32 Gbit/s OOK with a clear eye opening of more than 10 dB.

These results have been presented during ECOC 2014: “Impedance-Engineered Low Power MZM / Driver Assembly for CFP4-Size Pluggable Long Haul and Metro Transceiver” (Link to Google Scholar)

Other areas of interest are DML- and EML- drivers, especially for low power and very high speed applications.

Such special approaches could also be done due to individual customer requests. In this case please contact us.

Our expertise covers RF-packaging and chip-on-carrier concepts for Tx and Rx up to 100 GBaud

As a basis for these developments we have access to the most advanced electro-optic and electrical measurement and characterization systems. Beside real-time high-speed time domain measurement systems we can offer on-wafer differential S-parameter and single ended X-parameter measurements up to 67 GHz as well as single ended S-parameter measurements up to 170 GHz.