Design of a 8-taps, 10Gbps transmitter for automotive micro-controllers

This work describes the design of a transmitter for a 10 Gbps serial interface to be used in automotive Electronic Control Units. The data rate is chosen in order to assess the design challenges in automotive environment at this frequency. The focus will be mainly on challenges related to transistor level design using a standard 28 nm technology, nevertheless a system level overview will be also given. The proposed transmitter features feed-forward equalization with 8 taps (1 pre-cursor and 6 post-cursors, plus the main tap), whose strength is programmable with 16 discretization steps, optimizing the transmitter adaptability with reduced area. The proposed architecture is also able to tune its output impedance independently from the choice of the weights of the equalization tap. It features a 300 mV peak-to-peak eye diagram with 16 equalization levels and achieves a remarkably low 2.25 pJ/bit total power consumption (0.633 pJ/bit for the predriver+driver).