An 8Gb/s Transceiver with 3×-Oversampling 2-Threshold Eye-Tracking CDR Circuit for -36.8dB-loss Backplane

IT systems such as servers and routers need high-speed lower- power area-efficient chip-to-chip interconnections through backplane boards. These interconnections must overcome signal degradation due to the large insertion loss of low-cost boards. In this work, a 90nm CMOS 8Gb/s transceiver is developed. A TX 5- tap FFE, an RX analog equalizer, and a 2-tap DFE combined with a 2-threshold eye-tracking CDR achieve a BER of less than 10
^-12
through a 160cm backplane board with -36.8dB loss at 4GHz and a transceiver power consumption of 232mW (transmission efficiency of 1.2Gb/sxdB/mW).