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.

Preface to Special Topic on Integrated Circuits, Technologies and Applications

This Special Topic of the Journal of Semiconductors(JoS)features expanded versions of key articles presented at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Integrated Circuits Technologies and Applications(ICTA),which was held in Hefei,Anhui,China,from October 27 to 29,2023.IEEE ICTA is an IEEE flagship conference in the field of integrated circuits(IC)in China,which provides a communication platform for sharing the state-of-the-art techniques from experts in the field of ICs.Among the 93 papers presented at ICTA 2023,the Technical Program Committee and the Award Committee have selected 4 high-quality articles to recommend to the Special Topic of JoS,covering a wide range of technical fields,including one paper on RF ICs,two papers on Analog ICs and one paper on Wireline ICs.