A 36-Gb/s 2× Half-Baud-Rate Adaptive Receiver in 28-nm CMOS

A 36-Gb/s 2 <tex-math notation="LaTeX">×</tex-math> half-baud-rate (THBR) adaptive receiver (RX) is presented. The pattern-based adaptation method for adjusting the frequency response of a continuous-time linear equalizer (CTLE) is proposed. In addition, the reference voltage of the comparators is adapted to enhance the timing margin of the recovered clock in the RX. This THBR adaptive RX is fabricated in TSMC 28-nm CMOS technology with a core area of 0.097 mm <tex-math notation="LaTeX">²</tex-math> . The measured bit error rate (BER) is less than 10 <tex-math notation="LaTeX">⁻¹²</tex-math> for a 36-Gb/s pseudorandom binary sequence (PRBS) of 2 <tex-math notation="LaTeX">⁷</tex-math> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$-$</tex-math> 1, when the channel loss is 19 dB at 18 GHz. The total power consumption of this RX is 76 mW with gated adaptation circuits. The calculated figure of merit (FoM) is 2.1 pJ/bit.