A Compact Single-Ended Inverter-Based Transceiver With Swing Improvement for Short-Reach Links

Abstract

This paper presents a compact single-ended inverter-based transceiver with swing improvement for short-reach links. The low output impedance of the transmitter enlarges the output swing and the eye size to overcome large single-ended noise while relaxed impedance matching provides good signal integrity. For good area efficiency, the proposed transmitter utilizes an inverter driver which is much smaller than the conventional source-series termination driver and thus occupies only 42.5 μ m2. By taking the advantage of a large signal swing, the receiver consists of only four slicers and latches to minimize area overhead and to simplify the design. The transceiver was fabricated in 28-nm CMOS technology and tested at supply voltage of 1.13 V. The transmitter achieved a large output swing of 850 mV, which is 50.4 % larger than the conventional source-series termination transmitter. At the far-end of a channel consisting of a 1 m SMA cable and a 17 mm printed circuit board trace, the transmitter achieved eye openings of 440 mV and 234 mV at 16 Gb/s (-2.7 dB) and 20 Gb/s (-8 dB), respectively. Even with a large switching noise of 100 mV, the in-situ eye at the receiver was measured 114 mV with 7.4 dB loss. © 2004-2012 IEEE.