A 0.54pJ/b 20Gb/s ground-referenced single-ended short-haul serial link in 28nm CMOS for advanced packaging applications

Laminated packages, silicon interposer substrates, and special-purpose package-to-package interconnect [1,5], together with 3D stacking of silicon components [2] enable systems with greatly improved computational power, memory capacity and bandwidth. These package options offer very high-bandwidth channels between chips on the same substrate. We employ ground-referenced single-ended signaling, a charge-pump transmitter, and a co-designed channel to provide communication between multiple chips on one package with high bandwidth per pin and low energy per bit.