A Low-Power 220-GHz PAM-4 Receiver with Data Rate of 90-Gbps

This paper presents a compact and low-power receiver in 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS process. It consists of a transformer-based balun for impedance matching and a self-mixer as envelope detector. A transimpedance amplifier, followed by a buffer, is utilized as a load of self-mixer. A tap capacitor is employed to compensate serious imbalance of transformer-based balun at near 200 GHz. Simulation results show that this receiver achieves a data rate of 90 Gbps with digitally pre-distorted PAM-4 modulation input, with operating frequency range of 180-230 GHz. The receiver has an average power consumption is 8.75 mW under a 90Gbps, -14dBm maximum power input.