A 40Gb/s Multi-band Wireline Receiver Analog Front-end for 50.4dB Channel Loss Compensation

This paper presents a serial link receiver analog front-end (AFE) designed for high data rate high channel loss application. The continuous-time linear equalizer (CTLE) based AFE features three stages of peaking amplifier and two stages of variable gain amplifier (VGA). All stages in AFE are designed in transconductance-transimpedance (Gm-TIA) structure for bandwidth extension. The AFE can compensate for a 50.4dB insertion loss FR4 channel at a data rate of 40Gb/s without feedforward equalizer (FFE) / decision feedback equalizer (DFE). The total circuit is designed in 28nm CMOS technology and achieves a FoM value of 0.045pJ/bit/dB.