A 4Gb/s, 370µA low-power Tx FIR driver for LPDDR4 applications

Abstract

A new low-power Tx FIR driver has been developed targeting for LPDDR4 applications. Both conventional and proposed Tx FIR drivers are designed in 130nm CMOS process and their performances are compared. The proposed 4Gb/s FIR driver gets the vertical and horizontal eye-opening by 64.9% and 89.2%, each respectively, at -14.2dB of channel loss at Nyquist rate and consumes only 370µA from 1.2V supply. An low-dropout (LDO) and Op amp blocks to generate the medium DC voltages of pre-emphasis waveform use 500µA. The entire Tx FIR driver scheme consumes ≤0.9mA and occupies 0.0017mm² only.