A 1.55-to-32-Gb/s Four-Lane Transmitter with 3-Tap Feed Forward Equalizer and Shared PLL in 28-nm CMOS

Abstract

This paper presents a fully integrated physical layer (PHY) transmitter (TX) suiting for multiple industrial protocols and compatible with different protocol versions. Targeting a wide operating range, the LC-based phase-locked loop (PLL) with a dual voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) was integrated to provide the low jitter clock. Each lane with a configurable serialization scheme was adapted to adjust the data rate flexibly. To achieve high-speed data transmission, several bandwidth-extended techniques were introduced, and an optimized output driver with a 3-tap feed-forward equalizer (FFE) was proposed to accomplish high-quality data transmission and equalization. The TX prototype was fabricated in a 28-nm CMOS process, and a single-lane TX only occupied an active area of 0.048 mm2. The shared PLL and clock distribution circuits occupied an area of 0.54 mm2. The proposed PLL can support a tuning range that covers 6.2 to 16 GHz. Each lane’s data rate ranged from 1.55 to 32 Gb/s, and the energy efficiency is 1.89 pJ/bit/lane at a 32-Gb/s data rate and can tune an equalization up to 10 dB.