32-GS/s 6-bit DAC based on SiGe technology for IM-DD OFDM systems with non-uniform quantization.

In this paper, we design and fabricate a 32-GS/s 6-bit digital-to-analog convertor (DAC) based on SiGe technology. The DAC uses double sampling technique and segment current steering architecture to achieve high dynamic linearity. A corrector circuit is proposed to suppress the duty cycle error for linearity optimization. The spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) is above 31.5 dBc over the Nyquist bandwidth at the sampling rate of 32-GS/s. A full-rate input interface is integrated to realize data exchange with field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The experimental results show that the net data rate of 50-Gb/s orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals with non-uniform quantization can be generated by the designed and fabricated DAC. The OFDM signal transmission over 10-km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) with 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and 128-QAM formats have been successfully achieved.