A 40-mV-Swing Single-Ended Transceiver for TSV with a Switched-Diode RX Termination

Abstract

A switched-diode termination (SDT) is proposed to implement a low-power transceiver circuit for on-chip single-ended signaling through a through-silicon via (TSV). The channel signal swing is limited to 40 mV by the SDT to reduce the transmitter (TX) power. An inverter-cascade amplifier is used to reduce the receiver (RX) power. The SDT consists of an nMOS diode and a pMOS diode, which are connected in a series between power rails through the RX input node. Only one of these two diodes is switched on depending on the RX output data, which eliminates the short-circuit current of the center-tap resistor termination. Inverter feedback is applied to the cascade amplifier of the RX to increase the bandwidth from 0.9 to 5.0 GHz. The transceiver in the 65-nm CMOS process combined with an emulated five-stack TSV on the same chip works at 8 Gb/s with 149 fJ/b/pF and a 1.2-V supply.