Design and Characterization of a 9.2-Gb/s Transceiver for Automotive Microcontroller Applications With 8-Taps FFE and 1-Tap Unrolled/4-Taps DFE

We have designed a high-speed serial interface operating at 9.2 Gb/s for an automotive microcontroller in a 28-nm planar CMOS technology. The full-rate voltage-mode transmitter features an 8-tap feed-forward equalization where each tap can be programmed with steps of 1/16. Impedance tuning is possible by activating different driver replicas. The half-rate receiver features continuous time-linear equalization as well as decision-feedback equalization with 4 taps (one loop-unrolled), along with a dedicated phase-detection algorithm. The final circuit occupies an area of 0.125 mm2 and consumes 5.7 mW/Gb/s under nominal conditions. Experimental characterization demonstrates that the equalization strategies are able to improve the bit error rate well below $10^{-12}$ with typical communication channels for automotive applications.

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