An 11.05 mW/Gbps Quad-Channel 1.25-10.3125 Gbps Serial Transceiver with a 2-Tap Adaptive DFE and a 3-Tap Transmit FFE in 40 nm CMOS

Abstract

This paper presents a quad-channel 1.25-10.3125 Gbps wireline transceiver implemented in 40 nm CMOS technology. The transmitter consists of a bit width adjustment, a 40:2 multiplexer, a 2:1multiplexer, and a current-mode logic driver with a 3-tap feedforward equalizer. The receiver has a two-stage continuous-time linear equalizer, a 2-tap half-rate fully adaptive decision-feedback equalizer, a phase interpolation-based digital clock and data recovery (CDR) followed by a 2:40 demultiplexer, a bit width adaption. The transceiver also supports AC/DC coupling, CDR locking detection, PLL locking detection, loss of signal detection, automatic termination impedance calibration. A ring VCO-based PLL is designed in each lane to save power consumption, and a dual-core LC VCO-based PLL is implemented in each bank to generate a low jitter clock signal. At 10.3125 Gbps, the transceiver can equalize 28 dB Nyquist loss at a bit error rate of 10-12, and it consumes 114 mW with a 1.1 V supply. This work presents a high power efficiency of 11.05 mW/Gbps, and the transceiver is suitable for multi-standard applications due to its flexibility and power efficiency.