Abstract
A dual-mode transmitter, capable of both pulse amplitude modulation 4-level (PAM4) and duobinary-PAM4 signal generation, has been demonstrated in a 28-nm CMOS technology for memory interfaces. The transmitter utilizes a duobinary-PAM4 encoder that generates 7-level duobinary-PAM4 signals by adding two half-rate PAM4 signals driven by quarter-rate clocks. To generate duobinary-PAM4 signals and incorporate a 2-tap feed-forward equalizer, the proposed transmitter consists of 48 source-series terminated driver segments that are partitioned into four blocks. At 18-Gb/s, the proposed transmitter exhibits energy efficiency of 1.11-pJ/b and 1.66-pJ/b energy in duobinary-PAM4 and PAM4 modes, respectively.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 141-144 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Journal | IEEE Solid-State Circuits Letters |
| Volume | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2023 |
Keywords
- Duobinary
- duobinary-pulse amplitude modulation {4-level} (PAM4)
- memory interface
- multidrop channel
- multilevel signaling
- PAM4
- transmitter