A 0.4-mW/Gb/s Near-Ground Receiver Front-End With Replica Transconductance Termination Calibration for a 16-Gb/s Source-Series Terminated Transceiver

Abstract

This paper describes a low-power receiver front-end in a bidirectional near-ground source-series terminated (SST) interface implemented in a 40-nm CMOS process, which supports low-common mode differential NRZ signaling up to 16-Gb/s data rates. The high-speed operation is enabled by utilizing a common-gate amplifier stage with replica transconductance impedance calibration that accurately terminates the channel in the presence of receiver input loading. The near-ground low-impedance receiver also incorporates common-mode gain cancellation and in-situ equalization calibration to achieve reliable data reception at 16 Gb/s with better than 0.4 mW/Gb/s power efficiency over a memory link with more than 15 dB loss at the Nyquist frequency.