A 9Gbit/s serial transceiver for on-chip global signaling over lossy transmission lines

A 9 Gbit/s serial link transceiver for on-chip global signaling is presented. A transmitter serializes 8 b 1.125 Gbyte/s parallel data and transmits over 5.8 mm of lossy on-chip transmission line. The receiver de-serializes the data with the help of a digitally-tuned interpolator. An error checking block verifies the recovered and de-serialized data against the original data and counts the number of discrepancies. The prototype transceiver, implemented in 0.13 mum 8 metal CMOS, achieves 9 Gbit/s with four pre-defined data patterns and a measured BER is less than 10-10.