A 5Gb/s 7.1fJ/b/mm 8× multi-drop on-chip 10mm data link in 14nm FinFET CMOS SOI at 0.5V

We report a 5Gb/s data link implemented in 14nm FinFET CMOS SOI technology in which a single transmitter (TX) broadcasts NRZ data to eight receivers (RXs) distributed along an on-chip RC-dominated 10mm-long channel. The TX comprises a full-rate AC-coupled 2-tap FIR driver with a quarter-rate pre-driver. Each RX is equipped with a novel decision-gated 1-tap speculative DFE optimized for low-power. The RX architecture is half-rate and sliced data are de-multiplexed at quarter-rate. PRBS generator and checker are available on-chip. Correct operation was verified with PRBS31 data transmitted at 5Gb/s and concurrently received error-free at each drop with >40% horizontal margin (BER<10⁻¹²). At this data-rate the efficiency is 7.1fJ/b/mm' resulting in the best performance among multi-drop on-chip data links so far published (to the best of our knowledge). The TX and eight RXs are running on a 0.5 V power supply and consume 0.62 and 0.98mW' respectively.