Design and Characterization of a 9.2-Gb/s Transceiver for Automotive Microcontroller Applications With 8-Taps FFE and 1-Tap Unrolled/4-Taps DFE

Abstract

Significant advances have been made in solid-state imaging technologies that expand the visual experience and capability to levels far beyond the limitation of human eyes. Various applications range from life enhancement such as smartphone, AR/VR, surveillance, and automobile, to visions in hard-to-reach places like biomedical imaging. While the CMOS image-sensor (CIS) market remains fastest growing, new technologies and new materials are opening up new dimensions, leading to new applications and new challenges.

Design and Simulation of a 12 Gb/s Transceiver With 8-Tap FFE, Offset-Compensated Samplers and Fully Adaptive 1-Tap Speculative/3-Tap DFE and Sampling Phase for MIPI A-PHY Applications

“…Parts of the circuit have been re-designed to increase the speed up to 13 Gb/s: Most notably, now the receiver's CTLE and VGAs are capable of compensating 7.5 dB and 6 dB, respectively, and one of the DFE taps has been detached in order to implement offset compensation at the samplers at start-up time; other components were optimized for such a higher speed. As a consequence, the transceiver's figure of merit reported in [11] has increased to 6.8 mW/Gb/s w.r.t. 5.7 mW/Gb/s in Table I therein.…”

“…To have a rough estimate of the effect of jitter, we exploit the method in [19] applied to the eye obtained from post-processing of the pulse response. The jitter is estimated to be 1.5 ps RMS from the bathtub plots measured at 4.6 Gb/s in [11] and scaled to 12 Gb/s operation using a simple theoretical model; the result is a reduction in eye width from ≈ 38 ps to ≈ 19 ps at BER = 10 −12 . We now show that the FFE, CTLE and VGAs pre-sets chosen above can support fully-adaptive operations for different channels.…”

“…In this paper, through accurate probabilistic models as well as behavioural Verilog-A system-level modelling [10] coupled to post-layout transistor-level simulations, we present the capability of the transceiver in [11] to operate at the increased speed of 12 Gb/s (w.r.t. 9.2 Gb/s of the past implementation) with a channel complying with typical specifications of yet-to-be-defined MIPI A-PHY standard featuring an attenuation of 33 dB at Nyquist frequency [6].…”

“…The paper proceeds as follows: section II describes the architecture of the transceiver, the upgrade from the past realization [5], [11], [12] and the tests demonstrating operation over the automotive PVT range; section III describes the implementation of the fully-adaptive algorithm; transistor-level simulations are shown in section IV for realistic automotive channels, with considerations on the transceiver's equalization strategy; conclusions are drawn in section V.…”

Adaptive Equalization for Dispersion Mitigation in Multi-Channel Optical Communication Networks

“…All the above-mentioned pros are achieved at the cost of few features, such as limited bandwidth and interference from surrounding devices, as compared to their optical counterparts. Different techniques are used for the electronic compensation process, such as feed forward decision feedback equalizer (FF-DFE) [22], nonlinear FF-DFE (NL-FF-DFE) [23], and maximum likelihood sequence estimator (MLSE) [24]. All these techniques have been studied previously to mitigate the channel effects from wireless transmission.…”