A Compact Single-Ended Dual-band Receiver with Crosstalk and ISI Reductions for High-density I/O Interfaces

Abstract

A compact single-ended dual-band receiver is presented, consisting of one baseband using PAM-2 signaling and a coherent RF band using PAM-2/PAM-4 signaling. Exploiting the orthogonality between different bands and between adjacent PCB channels, the receiver reduces crosstalk and relaxes equalization requirements, enabling low-BER data transmission at frequencies where channel loss and crosstalk are high. The receiver adopts a passive-mixer-first architecture to improve the linearity and a flipped source-follower-based low-pass filter to improve the energy efficiency. Occupying 0.004 µm2 in TSMC 28nm technode, the proposed single-ended receiver achieves 0.45 pJ/bit at 9 Gb/s/pin for closely spaced 5-inch FR-4 channels and 0.6 pJ/bit at 6 Gb/s/pin for lossy and strongly coupled 22-inch FR-4 channels.