A 10 Gb/s Single-Ended Receiver Using Time Gap Sense Amplifier for Next-Generation HBM

This brief introduces a time gap sense amplifier (TGSA) to address the challenges of managing thousands of sense amplifiers (SAs) for next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM). The TGSA converts two reference voltages and data into the time domain, making decisions by detecting the time gaps between them. This approach enhances robustness to inherent mismatches of SA and reference voltage error without significantly increasing transistor size. In addition, a 20-stacked through-silicon via (TSV) channel is emulated to follow the stack height trend and achieve accurate modeling by removing a direct connection to the silicon substrate. The prototype receiver (RX) and the emulated TSV channel are fabricated in a 28 nm CMOS process, occupying 87.7 um2, and 0.029 mm2, respectively. The RX achieves a data rate of 10 Gb/s at a 0.8 V supply voltage (VDD) with a power consumption of 0.64 mW, resulting in an energy efficiency of 0.064 pJ/b and 0.018 pJ/b/pF.