This paper presents a compact and power efficient one-chip optical phased array (OPA) transmitter (TX) for optical wireless communication (OWC). A traveling-wave-electrode Mach-Zehnder modulator (TWE-MZM) and mm-Wave driver, which would traditionally be implemented by bulky off-the-shelf components, are monolithically integrated with a silicon-based 1×64 OPA onto a single chip, reducing an active area of the entire system down to 6.4 mm 2 . Moreover, a co-design and integration of TWE-MZM and mm-Wave driver largely minimizes the parasitics and mismatches of an interface between the TWE and mm-Wave driver. The 64-element optical antenna achieves beam divergence of 0.77˚ and 4.23˚ over transversal and longitudinal direction, respectively. The two-sided beam-steering angles of the array antenna in transversal and longitudinal direction are ±14.3˚ and 6.1˚, respectively, while the side-lobe suppression ratio is 7.81 dB. The co-integrated TWE-MZM and driver support a measured data rate up to 15 Gbps and consume 210 mW. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed electronic-photonic integrated circuit is the first OWC-application OPA TX, which monolithically integrates TWE-MZM, CMOS driver, and OPA all in one-chip. 

This article presents two wideband distributed amplifiers (DAs) to support high data rate communication. The two DAs, respectively, utilize NMOS-only and PMOS/NMOS hybrid gain cells for wideband power amplification in 45-nm CMOS RF silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology. The gain stages of the proposed NMOS-only DA are capacitively coupled to the input for improving linearity through different biasing modes of each gain stage, while the PMOS/NMOS hybrid DA removes the need for a large on-chip RF choke inductor. Also, the PMOS/NMOS hybrid gain stages can improve amplitude-to-phase modulation (AM–PM) linearity. For both NMOS-only and PMOS/NMOS DAs, intrastack coupling and input–output coupled transmission lines (TLs) are used to support wideband power amplification. Both intrastack coupling and input–output TL coupling are area-efficient. The proposed NMOS-only and PMOS/NMOS hybrid DAs achieve 8.8-/8.0-dB gain, 0.5–137-/ 0.5–67-GHz 3-dB small-signal bandwidth, and 16.5/17.6 peak saturated output power (PSAT)  with 15.1%/15.0% peak PAE, respectively. The NMOS-only and PMOS/NMOS DAs support 60-Gbit/s 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) at 25-GHz carrier frequency with 11.2-/12.4-dBm average output power and 6.5%/5.9% average PAE while maintaining 21.3-/ 21.2-dB SNR modulation error ratio (MER). The PMOS/NMOS DA measures the smallest core chip area among reported CMOS DAs at a similar frequency.