A 3.2pJ/b 0.068pJ/b/dB 25Gb/s NRZ Wireline Transceiver with 3-Tap FFE and Random Forest Classification for Compensating 47dB Loss in 16nm FinFET

An energy efficient (0.068pJ/b/dB) NRZ wireline transceiver is presented that leverages 3-tap FFE in the transmitter and feature extraction with classification in the receiver for compensating 30dB to 47dB channel loss with BER<10^-11. The proposed random forest classifier learns long-reach channel characteristics enabling the transceiver to achieve 3.2pJ/b at 25Gb/s for compensating 47dB loss.