A 28/56 Gb/s NRZ/PAM-4 dual-mode transceiver with 1/4 rate reconfigurable 4-tap FFE and half-rate slicer in a 28-nm CMOS

A 28/56 Gb/s NRZ/PAM-4 dual-mode transceiver(TRx)designed in a 28-nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconduc-tor(CMOS)process is presented in this article.A voltage-mode(VM)driver featuring a 4-tap reconfigurable feed-forward equal-izer(FFE)is employed in the quarter-rate transmitter(TX).The half-rate receiver(RX)incorporates a continuous-time linear equal-izer(CTLE),a 3-stage high-speed slicer with multi-clock-phase sampling,and a clock and data recovery(CDR).The experimen-tal results show that the TRx operates at a maximum speed of 56 Gb/s with chip-on board(COB)assembly.The 28 Gb/s NRZ eye diagram shows a far-end vertical eye opening of 210 mV with an output amplitude of 351 mV single-ended and the 56 Gb/s PAM-4 eye diagram exhibits far-end eye opening of 33 mV(upper-eye),31 mV(mid-eye),and 28 mV(lower-eye)with an output amplitude of 353 mV single-ended.The recovered 14 GHz clock from the RX exhibits random jitter(RJ)of 469 fs and deterministic jitter(DJ)of 8.76 ps.The 875 Mb/s de-multiplexed data features 593 ps horizontal eye opening with 32.02 ps RJ,at bit-error rate(BER)of 10-5(0.53 UI).The power dissipation of TX and RX are 125 and 181.4 mW,respectively,from a 0.9-V sup-ply.

Free-spectral-range-free filters with ultrawide tunability across the S+C+L band

Optical filters are essential parts of advanced optical communication and sensing systems.Among them,the ones with an ultrawide free spectral range(FSR)are especially critical.They are promising to provide access to numerous wavelength channels highly desired for large-capacity optical transmission and multipoint multiparameter sensing.Present schemes for wide-FSR filters either suffer from limited cavity length or poor fabrication tolerance or impose an additional active-tuning control requirement.We theoretically and experimentally demonstrate a filter that features FSR-free operation capability,subnanometer optical bandwidth,and acceptable fabrication tolerance.Only one single deep dip within a record-large waveband(S+C+L band)is observed by appropriately designing a side-coupled Bragg-grating-assisted Fabry–Perot filter,which has been applied as the basic sensing unit for both the refractive index and temperature measurement.Five such basic units are also cascaded in series to demonstrate a multichannel filter.This work provides a new insight to design FSR-free filters and opens up a possibility of flexible large-capacity integration using more wavelength channels,which will greatly advance integrated photonics in optical communication and sensing.