Broadcom, Irvine, CA Rapid internet traffic growth has fueled the demand for bandwidth in metro networks and data centers and pushed the serial link data rate into 25Gb/s territory, populated by such electrical interface as OIF CEI-25G, CEI-28G [1], IEEE 802.3bj 100G-KR4. To cope with severe channel impairments at 25Gb/s with up to 30dB loss at Nyquist, a feed-forward equalizer (FFE)/decision feedback equalizer (DFE) based transceiver without power-hungry analog-todigital converter (ADC) provides robust performance. This work presents a low-power and area-efficient transceiver that employs a 14-tap adaptive DFE at the receiver (RX) and a 5-tap FFE at the transmitter (TX) for multi-standard applications up to 28Gb/s in 28nm CMOS.