A 12-Gb/s 10-ns Turn-On Time Rapid ON/OFF Baud-Rate DFE Receiver in 65-nm CMOS

• Published in: IEEE journal of solid-state circuits Vol. 55; no. 8; pp. 2196 - 2205
• Main Authors: Kim, Dongwook, Ahmed, Mostafa G., Choi, Woo-Seok, Elkholy, Ahmed, Hanumolu, Pavan Kumar
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.08.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Baud rate; burst mode; clock and data recovery (CDR); Clock recovery; Clocks; CMOS; Data recovery; decision feedback equalizer (DFE); Decision feedback equalizers; Gain; Insertion loss; rapid ON/OFF (ROO); Receivers; Timing; Vibration
• ISSN: 0018-9200; 1558-173X
• DOI: 10.1109/JSSC.2020.2978138

Rapid ON/OFF (ROO) operation helps scale power in accordance with link utilization. In this article, we present a baud-rate ROO receiver that can turn on in just 10 ns (~120 UI). Baud-rate clock and data recovery (CDR) is implemented using a new timing function that is amenable to operation with a loop un-rolled decision feedback equalizer (DFE). The receiver is turned on rapidly by sweeping the recovered clock phase across the received data bit by offsetting the digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) frequency at each power-ON event. This first ROO DFE receiver also includes a continuous-time linear equalizer (CTLE) and three-tap DFE to compensate up to 20-dB channel loss at Nyquist. Fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process, the prototype receiver recovers 12 Gb/s with BER < 10 −12 and achieves a >30-MHz JTOL corner, 377 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">fs_{\text {rms}} </tex-math></inline-formula> recovered clock jitter, and 3.8-pJ/bit energy efficiency.