A low power duobinary voltage mode transmitter

This paper presents a novel low power duobinary voltage mode transmitter in 90-nm CMOS process for wireline communication. As a matter of fact, voltage mode transmitters potentially save much more power than current mode transmitters. By adding a medium level, a half supply voltage, to conventional NRZ voltage mode transmitters, duobinary coding can simply be achieved. Post-layout simulation demonstrates the architecture with a new preemphasis method dissipates approximately 16.35 mW from a 1.0 V supply when transmitting 8 Gb/s 1.0 V differential amplitude data with 2-tap pre-emphasis, achieving 2.04 pJ/bit energy efficiency.