Radiation Assessment of a 56-Gb/s Electro-Absorption Modulator Driver for Optical Intrasatellite Links

This article presents a radiation-hardened-by-process 56-Gb/s electro-absorption modulator (EAM) driver designed in a 130-nm silicon germanium (SiGe) bipolar complementary metal oxide semiconductor (BiCMOS) technology for application in optical intrasatellite links. Details of the driver architecture are provided, along with the electrical and optical measurement setups used to evaluate its performance. To assess the vulnerability of the driver against radiation exposure in the space environment, samples were irradiated with X-rays up to a total accumulated dose of 1.2 Mrad(Si), simulating the effects of total ionizing dose (TID) in orbit. Furthermore, heavy-ion experiments corroborated the driver’s resilience to single-event transients (SETs) across a range of linear energy transfers (LETs) from 20 to 65.2 MeV cm2/mg, with a particle fluence of 1.2×107 cm−2. No single-event latchup (SEL) was observed in the irradiated samples during the heavy-ion exposure.