A low latency transceiver macro with robust design technique for processor interface

This paper describes a 65 nm 16-bit parallel transceiver IP macro, whose bandwidth is 4.8 GByte/s with 5 pf load including the HBM 2000v ESD protection. Equalizers and CDR modules, CRC checkers and 8b/10b encoders are not added in the design for reducing the latency and the whole latency is 7 ns without cables. Since the transceiver has many robust features including a PVT independent PLL with calibrations, the low skew differential clock tree, a stable current mode driver with common mode feedback. The transceiver can tolerance 20% power supply variations and work properly at different process corners and the extreme temperatures. The transceiver can be applied for the interface of sub-100 nm high performance processors which require low latency and high stability. The transceiver shows a BER less than 10^-15 at 3 Gb/s/pin.