A high speed transmitter circuit for the ATLAS/CMS HL-LHC pixel readout chip

In order to satisfy the high output bandwidth requirement imposed by the High Luminosity LHC, a high speed transmitter circuit was designed and integrated into the RD53A demonstrator chip for the phase 2 ATLAS/CMS pixel detector upgrade. A clock and data recovery circuit recovers clock from the 160 Mb/s data stream received by the chip, and provides the high speed clock to the serializer, where the 1.28 Gb/s output stream is formed from the 20-bit data words provided by the data encoding logic. The output stage employs a three-tap current-mode logic cable driver with adjustable tap weights for optimal pre-emphasis in order to compensate for the high frequency loss of the foreseen low mass cable. Each RD53A chip includes four output data lines, offering in total 5.12 Gb/s output bandwidth. The RD53A chip has been fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS technology. The output jitter was measured to be ∼ 20 ps (1 σ ) with pseudo random data at the nominal speed of 1.28 Gb/s.