The growing deployment of bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications and cloud computing continue to escalate the burden on today’s mobile communication network. Meanwhile, the demand for high-performance data traffic has gradually migrated from centralized telecommunication infrastructures to cost-sensitive mobile applications and consumer electronics. Therefore, the need for cost reduction of peripheral devices in mobile networks are accelerating, as the number of such devices increases to maintain network coverage with shrinking mobile network cell size and higher user data throughput. A hybrid fiber-wireless network is a promising approach to provide a flexible and high performance solution for short-range ( 1 km) backhaul links deployment in high data traffic areas. Such s...[ Read more ]

The growing deployment of bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications and cloud computing continue to escalate the burden on today’s mobile communication network. Meanwhile, the demand for high-performance data traffic has gradually migrated from centralized telecommunication infrastructures to cost-sensitive mobile applications and consumer electronics. Therefore, the need for cost reduction of peripheral devices in mobile networks are accelerating, as the number of such devices increases to maintain network coverage with shrinking mobile network cell size and higher user data throughput. A hybrid fiber-wireless network is a promising approach to provide a flexible and high performance solution for short-range (< 1 km) backhaul links deployment in high data traffic areas. Such systems will require the integration of optical and wireless communication transceiver circuits. To address this emerging trend, this thesis presents the design and implementation of optical-to-millimeter-wave (mmW) modulator system-on-a-chip (SoC) using mainstream CMOS technology for supporting low-cost deployment of such network.

In this thesis, an optical-to-mmW modulator SoC with a fully integrated 850-nm wavelength optical receiver front-end and a 60-GHz QPSK modulator is presented for the first time. As the first block in an optical receiver chain, the transimpedance amplifier (TIA) dictates the overall system noise and gain-bandwidth performance. An inverter-based TIA with a multiple-peaking network is proposed to address design challenges of conventional CMOS TIAs. The peaking network effective extends the TIA bandwidth by 2.8 times. A power efficiency of 0.12 pJ/bit is achieved by the optimized inverter based core amplifier. Realized in 65-nm CMOS, the overall optical receiver front-end achieves ‒3-dBm input sensitivity at 4 Gb/s with 10^-12 BER. The quadrature modulator directly up-converts the de-multiplexed 2-Gb/s I&Q NRZ data to a 4-Gb/s QPSK signal at 60-GHz in the unlicensed mmW band. Our design demonstrates that a small form factor and low-cost optical-to-mmW modulator can be realized in mainstream CMOS technology to support cost-effective implementation of fiber-wireless networks. In the optical receiver, a clock and data recovery (CDR) unit is required following the TIA front-end for generating a phase-aligned clock to de-serialize the high-speed incoming data for baseband processing. A power-efficient CDR with embedded equalization to achieve error free operation (BER < 10^-12) up to 26 Gb/s under 13-dB channel loss at Nyquist frequency has been developed. The proposed CDR could be further integrated with the fiber-wireless modulator to realize a complete fiber-wireless SoC.

The design, implementation and characterization results of prototypes are presented in this thesis along with the proposed direction of future work.