A low-swing AC- and DC- coupled voltage-mode driver with pre-emphasis

This paper describes a 2-tap voltage-mode driver with an auxiliary AC-coupled driver. Tap weight control and impedance matching are accomplished by a dual-loop regulator. The AC-coupling technique is employed to enhance the edge rates and reduce the burden of the post-tap equalizer. The proposed transmitter is fabricated using a 0.13-μm CMOS technology. It is shown that when 200mVp-p 5-Gb/s signals are sent over 10" FR4 channels, the eye of the received data has 0.87 UI timing margin, 114 mV voltage margin.