6.1 A 112Gb/s Serial Link Transceiver With 3-tap FFE and 18-tap DFE Receiver for up to 43dB Insertion Loss Channel in 7nm FinFET Technology

Abstract

Social media, video streaming and working at home fuels the demand for bandwidth in metro networks and data centers and pushes serial link data rates into <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$100\mathsf{Gb}/\mathsf{s}$</tex> territory. To cope with severe channel impairments at <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$112\mathsf{Gb}/\mathsf{s}$</tex> PAM-4 with <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$&gt; 30\mathsf{dB}$</tex> loss at Nyquist, recently published transceivers [1–4] adopted <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathsf{ADC}/\mathsf{DSP}$</tex> -based receivers in advanced FinFET processes. This work presents a low-power and area-efficient non-ADC/DSP-based transceiver that employs fully adaptive 3-tap <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathsf{FFE}/18$</tex> -tap DFE at the receiver (RX) and <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathsf{a} \ 7\mathsf{b}$</tex> DAC-based transmitter (TX) up to <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$112\mathsf{Gb}/\mathsf{s}$</tex> in <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$7\mathsf{nm}$</tex> FinFET technology for large-scale ASIC applications.