A 36-Gb/s 2× Half-Baud-Rate Adaptive Receiver in 28-nm CMOS

A 36-Gb/s
$2\times $
half-baud-rate (THBR) adaptive receiver (RX) is presented. The pattern-based adaptation method for adjusting the frequency response of a continuous-time linear equalizer (CTLE) is proposed. In addition, the reference voltage of the comparators is adapted to enhance the timing margin of the recovered clock in the RX. This THBR adaptive RX is fabricated in TSMC 28-nm CMOS technology with a core area of 0.097 mm2. The measured bit error rate (BER) is less than 10−12 for a 36-Gb/s pseudorandom binary sequence (PRBS) of 27 – 1, when the channel loss is 19 dB at 18 GHz. The total power consumption of this RX is 76 mW with gated adaptation circuits. The calculated figure of merit (FoM) is 2.1 pJ/bit.