A 0.4mW/Gb/s 16Gb/s near-ground receiver front-end with replica transconductance termination calibration

The growing demand for low-power and high-fidelity chip-to-chip data communication has motivated the use of near-ground or low-common-mode voltage (LCM) signaling [1-2]. However, deployment of such signaling for high-speed applications such as graphics memory interfaces has been hampered by complications of the transmitter and receiver designs. Recent techniques have enhanced the performance of source-series terminated transmitters by accommodating impedance and equalization calibration at a low power cost [3]. This work advances LCM receiver high-frequency operation by introducing an accurate termination calibration, taking into account the receiver loading on the data link channel. Our receiver also incorporates common-mode-to-differential-gain cancellation and in-situ equalization calibration for reliable data reception at 16Gb/s over a 3” FR4 PCB memory link with 15dB loss at Nyquist frequency.