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

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.