A 16.8 Gbps/Channel Single-Ended Transceiver in 65 nm CMOS for SiP-Based DRAM Interface on Si-Carrier Channel

Abstract

A 16.8 Gbps/channel single-ended transceiver for SiP-based DRAM interface on silicon carrier channel is proposed in this paper. A transmitter, receiver , and channel are all included in a single package as SiP. A current mode 4:1 MUX with 1-tap feed-forward equalizer (FFE) i s used as a serializer, and this 4:1 MUX uses 25% duty clock to prevent short circuit current when consecutive 2-phase clocks overlap. Additionally, an open drain output driver with asynchronous type 1-tap FFE is used in the transmitter. Because of its small physical size, a common mode variation of Si-carrier channel f rom process variation is more se- rious than that of conventional PCB. This common mode variation degrades bit error rates (BER) at single-ended signaling. To obtain effective single-ended signaling on Si-carrier channel, a source follower-based continuous tim e linear equalizers and self- generator with training algorithm on the receiver are proposed. An implemented Si-carrier channel uses meshed layer as a reference to reduce insertion loss. A BER less than 1e-12 is achieved in 65 nm CMOS and the power efficiency of the transceiver is 5.9 pJ/bit with 120 terminations at each transceiver side.