Low-Power Circuits for a 2.5-V, 10.7-to-86-Gb/s Serial Transmitter in 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS

Low-power building blocks for a serial transmitter operating up to 86 Gb/s are designed and implemented in a 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS technology with 150-GHz f_T SiGe HBT. Power reduction is achieved by employing a low-voltage 2.5-V BiCMOS logic family, and by trading off bias current for inductive peaking. A serial transmitter test chip is fabricated in a 130-nm, 150-GHz f_T SiGe BiCMOS technology. Operation is verified up to 86 Gb/s at room temperature (92Gb/s and 71Gb/s at 0degC and 100degC, respectively). As compared to recent state-of-the-art CMOS results, this work shows that by adding a SiGe HBT to a CMOS process one can achieve double the data rate with half the power dissipation