A 312.5Mbps-32Gbps JESD204C Wireline Transceiver Back-Compatible with JESD204B in 28nm CMOS

This paper presents a 32Gbps wireline transceiver that not only supports the JESD204C standard but also maintains back-compatibility with JESD204B with minimal additional circuitry. Additionally, a pattern-filtered phase detector (PFPD) is proposed to circumvent the side effect of ambiguous sampling clock phase caused by loop-unrolled 1st post-cursor tap equalization scheme in the decision-feedback equalization (DFE). A 16 GHz external half-rate clock is injected into an on-chip injection-locked ring oscillator to distribute the 16 GHz clock for both the receiver and the transmitter. Multiple on-chip adaption engines and calibration loops are also added to assist the whole system work properly, such as tap weight and desired level adaption engine integrated into the decision-feedback equalizer, duty cycle distortion correction and IQ-mismatch correction. Fabricated in 28nm CMOS process, the proposed transceiver demonstrates its ability to operate within a signaling range from 312.5Mbps to 32Gbps, achieving a BER below 10 <tex-math notation="LaTeX">⁻¹²</tex-math> over a 14.9dB channel loss at Nyquist frequency. It occupies an aggregated area of 1.4 mm <tex-math notation="LaTeX">²</tex-math> and consumes 203mW at 32Gbps, in which 50mW for the transmitter (TX) and 153mW for the receiver (RX), therefore end up achieving 6.34pJ/bit power efficiency at 32Gbps.