A 0.66-pJ/b 42-Gb/s NRZ Receiver for Short-Reach Wireline Communications in 28-nm CMOS

This letter presents an energy-efficient nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) receiver for short-reach wireline applications. A charge-steering (CS)-based quarter-rate 1:4 demultiplexer with one-tap feedforward equalization (DeMUX-FFE) is proposed to achieve low power consumption. The effective gain of the CS latch with NRZ output is increased by an extended regeneration time, and intersymbol interference (ISI) caused by charge sharing is reduced through the proposed quarter-rate timing scheme. Fabricated in a 28-nm CMOS process, the prototype receiver achieves an energy efficiency of 0.66 pJ/b at a 42-Gb/s data rate, with a 0.3-unit-interval (UI) timing margin at a bit error rate (BER) of$1\times 10^{-12}$.