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.

A biologically stable, self-catalytic DNAzyme machine encapsulated by metal-phenolic nanoshells for multiple microRNA imaging

DNAzyme machines play critical roles in the fields of cell imaging, disease diagnosis, and cancer therapy. However, the applications of DNAzyme machines are limited by the nucleases-induced degradation,non-specific binding of proteins, and insufficient provision of cofactors. Herein, protected DNAzyme machines with different cofactor designs(referred to as Pro Ds) were nanoengineered by the construction of multifunctional metal-phenolic nanoshells to deactivate the interferential proteins, including nucleases and non-specific binding proteins. Moreover, the nanoshells not only facilitate the cellular internalization of Pro Ds but provide specific metal ions acting as cofactors of the designed DNAzymes. Cellular imaging results demonstrated that Pro Ds could effectively and simultaneously monitor multiple tumor-related micro RNAs in living cells. This facile and rapid strategy that encapsulates DNAzyme machines into the protective metal-phenolic nanoshells is anticipated to extend to a wide range of functional nucleic acidsbased biomedical applications.

Near infrared light-induced dynamic modulation of enzymatic activity through polyphenol-functionalized liquid metal nanodroplets

Dynamic manipulation of enzymatic activity is a challenging task for applications in chemical and pharmaceutical industries due to the difficult modification and variable conformation of various enzymes.Here, we report a new strategy for reversible dynamic modulation of enzymatic activity by near-infrared light-induced photothermal conversion based on polyphenol-functionalized liquid metal nanodroplets(LM). The metal-phenolic nanocoating not only provides colloidal stability of LM nanodroplets but also generates nanointerfaces for the assembly of various enzymes on the LM nanodroplets. Upon near infrared(NIR) irradiation, the localized microenvironmental heating through photothermal effect of the LM nanodroplets allows tailoring the enzymatic activity without affecting the bulk temperature. A library of functional enzymes, including proteinase K, glucoamylase, glucose oxidase, and Bst DNA polymerase, is integrated to perform a reversible control and enhanced activities even after five times of cycles, demonstrating great potential in bacterial fermentation, bacteriostasis, and target gene amplification.