A 16-Gb/s/wire 4-Wire Short-Haul Transceiver with Balanced Single-Ended Signaling (BASES) in 28-nm CMOS

Abstract

This paper presents a 4-wire, 3-level, and 16-Gb/s/wire transceiver array for short-reach interconnects. The proposed transceiver adopts the balanced single-ended signaling (BASES) to reduce the simultaneous switching noise (SSN) and the electro-magnetic interference (EMI). The four transmit encoders and voltage-mode drivers produce three-level, common-mode-balanced, and multi-lane signals. The receive terminations and equalizers utilize the CM-balancing property of the BASES coding to recover the transmitted signals with a high noise rejection capability. The 4-wire transceiver was fabricated in a 28-nm CMOS technology and achieved a 64-Gb/s aggregate data rate with 3.15-pJ/bit energy efficiency.