A High-Speed 390 GHz BPOOK Transmitter

This chapter details the design of a high-speed 390 GHz BPOOK transmitter in 28 nm CMOS. The objective of this project was to investigate transmitter architectures to exploit the large available bandwidth in the THz frequency range. The modulation, architecture, and circuit design are thus optimized for data rate as well as THz output power. First an overview is given of possible THz transmitter architectures with their respective advantages and disadvantages. The central modulation of this system, binary-phase on–off keying or BPOOK, will be extensively studied in the next section. The subsequent sections will then cover the architecture, circuit design, and measurements results of the designed 390 GHz transmitter. Based on the transmitter’s performance, the tripler-based architecture is reassessed and compared to its 130 GHz tripler-less transmitter equivalent. Finally, the chapter is concluded.