Short-Reach and Pin-Efficient Interfaces Using Correlated NRZ

Correlated Non-Return-to-Zero (CNRZ) signaling exhibits better pin-efficiency compared to the conventional binary differential NRZ signaling, while it does not compromise the sensitivity to Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI). This article analyzes performance of CNRZ transceivers, and provides experimental data for an Ultra-Short Reach (USR) link at 20.83 Gb/s/wire, implemented in FinFET 16 nm technology, consuming 1.02 pJ/b, As CNRZ is based on an orthogonal transformation, both encoding and decoding can be performed in analog, without any cost in terms of latency.