Design of a 8-taps, 10Gbps transmitter for automotive micro-controllers

Abstract

This work describes the design of a transmitter for a\ud 10 Gbps serial interface to be used in automotive Electronic Control\ud Units. The data rate is chosen in order to assess the design\ud challenges in automotive environment at this frequency. The focus\ud will be mainly on challenges related to transistor level design\ud using a standard 28 nm technology, nevertheless a system level\ud overview will be also given. The proposed transmitter features\ud feed-forward equalization with 8 taps (1 pre-cursor and 6 postcursors,\ud plus the main tap), whose strength is programmable with\ud 16 discretization steps, optimizing the transmitter adaptability\ud with reduced area. The proposed architecture is also able to\ud tune its output impedance independently from the choice of the\ud weights of the equalization tap. It features a 300 mV peak-topeak\ud eye diagram with 16 equalization levels and achieves a\ud remarkably low 2.25 pJ/bit total power consumption (0.633 pJ/bit\ud for the predriver+driver)

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

“…The transmitter [5] operates at full rate and performs feed-forward equalization (FFE) with 1 pre-, 1 main-and 6 post-cursors, all programmable in steps of 1/16 (≈ 1.16 dB of variation). A low-dropout regulator (LDO) is used to set the output voltage swing.…”

“…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.…”

A 1.89 mW/Gbps SST transmitter with three-tap FFE and impedance calibration

“…However, two-tap feed-forward equalization (FFE) with −15.5 dB maximum de-emphasis strength limits its application for long channel loss. Thus, some sophisticated equalization circuity with hightap FFE has been proposed to compensate for the fre-quency-dependent loss of channels [14,15]. Unfortunately, this additional complexity results in increased power consumption and area costs.…”