A 16 Gbps, Full-Duplex Transceiver over Lossy On-Chip Interconnects in 28 nm CMOS Technology

Abstract

A high-speed full-duplex transceiver (FDT) over lossy on-chip interconnects is presented. The FDT employs a hybrid circuit to separate the inbound and outbound signals from each other and also performs echo-cancellation with the help of the main and the auxiliary drivers. A hybrid MOS device is utilized for impedance matching and conversion of the received voltage signal into a current signal for amplification. Moreover, a compensation capacitance ( C c ) is used at the output of the main driver to minimize the residual echo signal and achieve a higher data rate. The entire FDT architecture has been designed in TSMC 28 nm CMOS standard process with 0.9 V supply voltage. The performance results validate a 16 Gbps FD operation with a root-mean-square (RMS) jitter of 16.4 ps, and a power efficiency of 0.16 pJ/b/mm over a 5 mm on-chip interconnect without significant effect due to process-voltage-temperature (PVT) variations. To the best knowledge of the authors, this work shows the highest achievable full-duplex data rate, among the solutions reported in the literature to date, yet with low complexity, low layout area of 1581 μ m 2 and competitive power efficiency.