A Fully Integrated 160-Gb/s D-Band Transmitter Achieving 1.1-pJ/b Efficiency in 22-nm FinFET

This work presents a fully integrated 140-GHz transmitter (TX) achieving a data rate of 160 Gb/s with ~1-pJ/b efficiency in the 22-nm Intel FinFET technology. The TX leverages a wideband radio frequency digital to analog converter (RF-DAC) architecture with embedded 4:1 multiplexer, and it is integrated with a sub-sampling quadrature phase-locked loop (PLL), frequency tripler, local oscillator (LO) buffers, wideband two-stage power amplifier (PA), and on-chip SRAM/pseudorandom binary sequence (PRBS) for high-speed data generation. The TX achieves 120/160-Gb/s 16 quadratic-amplitude modulation (QAM) with −19/−17-dB error vector magnitude (EVM) at an output power of +1.5/+0.8 dBm.