Design of Automotive VCSEL Transmitter with On-Chip Feedforward Optical Power Control

We propose a novel 50 Mb/s optical transmitter fabricated in a 0.6 μm BiCMOS technology for automotive applications. The proposed VCSEL driver chip was designed to operate with a single supply voltage ranging from 3.0 V to 5.25 V. A fully integrated feedforward current control circuit is presented to stabilize the optical output power without any external components. The experimental results show that the optical output power can be stable within a 1.1 dB range and the extinction ratio greater than 14 dB over the automotive environmental temperature range of −40◦C to 105◦C. key words: driver circuits, integrated circuits, feedforward systems, surface-emitting lasers