A 4.8-mW/Gb/s 9.6-Gb/s 5 1-Lane Source-Synchronous Transmitter in 65-nm Bulk CMOS

A low-jitter and low-power source-synchronous serializer/deserializer transmitter (TX) with a data rate of 9.6 Gb/s is presented. The TX consists of five data channels plus one forwarded-clock channel and features a total jitter of 20.39 ps p-p at 10^-12 bit error rate. Low jitter is achieved through the use of a phase-locked loop with bandwidth linearization that has a random RMS jitter of 0.66 ps. A global clock distribution network is proposed to minimize the power-supply-induced jitter and the power consumption. The TX transmits preemphasized data through a current-mode logic driver with a four-tap feedforward equalizer. The on-chip output impedance and the signal amplitude can be accurately calibrated by a successive approximation register logic separately. The total power consumption for the 5 +1-lane TX physical core fabricated in 65-nm bulk CMOS running at 9.6 Gb/s is 230 mW or 4.8 mW/Gb/s.