A 5.6-mW 1-Gb/s/pair pulsed signaling transceiver for a fully AC coupled bus

This paper describes a low-power synchronous pulsed signaling scheme on a fully AC coupled multidrop bus for board-level chip-to-chip communications. The proposed differential pulsed signaling transceiver achieves a data rate of 1 Gb/s/pair over a 10-cm FR4 printed circuit board, which dissipates only 2.9 mW (2.9 pJ/bit) for the driver and channel termination and 2.7 mW for the receiver pre-amplifier at 500 MHz. The fully AC coupled multipoint bus topology with high signal integrity is proposed that minimizes the effect of inter-symbol interference (ISI) and achieves a 3 dB corner frequency of 3.2 GHz for an 8-drop PCB trace. The prototype transceiver chip is implemented in a 0.10-μm 1.8-V CMOS DRAM technology and packaged in a WBGA. It occupies an active area of 330×85 μm².