A 10Gb/s compact low-power serial I/O with DFE-IIR equalization in 65nm CMOS

The design of compact low-power I/O transceivers continues to be a challenge for both chip-to-chip and backplane applications. The introduction of dense fine-pitch silicon packaging technologies, that in principle are capable of supporting tens of thousands of high-data-rate I/O for local chip-to-chip interconnect, will make I/O area and power requirements even more stringent.This paper describes an alternative low-power compact I/O transceiver with RX equalization that achieves the required multi-bit postcursor cancellation without a high tap-count DFE. While this work targets data transmission over Si carrier links at rates up to 10Gb/s, it is also relevant to backplane channels.