Abstract
This paper presents a low power monolithically integrated optical transmitter with avalanche mode light emitting diodes in a 140 nm silicon-on-insulator CMOS technology. Avalanche mode LEDs in silicon exhibit wide-spectrum electroluminescence (400 nm < λ < 850 nm), which has a significant overlap with the responsivity of silicon photodiodes. This enables monolithic CMOS integration of optocouplers, for e.g. smart power applications requiring high data rate communication with a large galvanic isolation. To ensure a certain minimum number of photons per data pulse (or per bit), light emitting diode drivers must be robust against process, operating conditions and temperature variations of the light emitting diode. Combined with the avalanche mode light emitting diode's steep current-voltage curve at relatively high breakdown voltages, this conventionally results in high power consumption and significant heating. The presented transmitter circuit is intrinsically robust against these issues, thereby enabling low power operation.
Highlights
Many smart power applications require data communication with galvanic isolation
This paper presents a low power monolithically integrated optical transmitter with avalanche mode light emitting diodes in a 140 nm silicon-on-insulator CMOS technology
Optocouplers are immune to electro-magnetic interference (EMI) effects and monolithic integration of optocouplers is attractive for smart power and on chip communication applications [2]
Summary
Many smart power applications require data communication with galvanic isolation. Currently this is achieved using inductive isolators (transformers), capacitive isolators or discrete optocouplers [1]. Optoelectronic properties of AMLEDs are sensitive to process, voltage and temperature (PVT) variations [12] Together with their steep current-voltage (IV ) curve at relatively high voltages, this results in high power consumption, and significant heating [10, 11] which are bottlenecks to implement power efficient On-Off Keying (OOK) LED driver circuits in optocoupling applications. The principle of the driver circuit is to drive the AMLED (per data bit) with a minimum quantity of avalanche charge required to get certain amount of detectable photons at the PD, independent of PVT variations.
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