A Jitter-Robust 40 Gb/s ADC-Based Multicarrier Receiver Front-End With 4-GS/s Baseband Pipeline-SAR ADCs in 22-nm FinFET

Abstract

Demand for increased data rates in serial link transceivers calls for innovative architectures capable of overcoming impairments such as limited channel bandwidth (BW) and stringent jitter specifications. This article presents a receiver front-end (RXFE) architecture that supports multicarrier signaling to provide a ∼3 × relaxation in clock jitter requirements. A total of 40 Gb/s data rate is supported by three 4-GS/s bands with baseband (BB) four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) and mid-band (MB) and high-band (HB) 16-state quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM16) on 4- and 8-GHz orthogonal carriers, respectively. The RXFE uses three per-band optimized continuous-time linear equalizers (CTLEs) to partially equalize the in-band channel loss and four-way time-interleaved 7-b pipelined-successive approximation register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Tight band spacing is achieved with tolerable inter-channel interference (ICI) using resettable integrators in the receiver segments. Fabricated in a 22-nm fin field-effect transistor (FinFET), the proposed 40-Gb/s multicarrier RXFE can tolerate up to 1.6-psrms jitter and achieve a bit error rate (BER) < 10-5 operating over a channel with 20-dB loss at 10 GHz when combined with an off-chip one-tap digital ICI canceller. The ADC-based front-end achieves 3.05-pJ/bit power efficiency, including all the front-ends, ADC, and clocking power.