A 32-Gb/s Dual-Mode Transceiver With One-Tap FIR and Two-Tap IIR RX Only Equalization in 65-nm CMOS Technology

This article presents an receiver (RX) only equalization (ROE) technique that eliminates feed-forward equalization (FFE) in transmitter (TX) and bandwidth improved output driver without increment of power consumption. With a help of the proposed design technique, the power consumption, circuit complexity, and design cost are improved. The proposed RX with one-tap finite-impulse response (FIR) and second-tap IIR decision feedback equalizer (DFE) removes the FFE equalization in TX by moving the sampling point of main cursor in the received data. A simpler TX architecture with nMOS only output driver (NOD) owing to the ROE facilitates a wide bandwidth and energy efficient dual-mode (differential and single-ended) operation. The proposed transceiver was fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS technology. The RX achieves bit error rate (BER) less than 10^{-12} over a 22-dB channel loss at 32 Gb/s with 0.62-pJ/bit energy efficiency, and the TX with NOD has 0.77- and 0.40-pJ/bit energy efficiency at 32 Gb/s in differential mode and single-ended mode, respectively. The occupied area of TX and RX is 0.002 and 0.024 mm 2 , respectively.