A 36 Gb/s wireline receiver with adaptive CTLE and 1-tap speculative DFE in 0.13 µm BiCMOS technology

Abstract

This paper presents a 36 Gb/s receiver equalizer including an adaptive continuous time linear equalizer (CTLE), which is based on slope detection and a half-rate speculative decision feedback equalizer (DFE) in 0.13 µm BiCMOS technology for high speed serial link. The CTLE with middle frequency compensation can not only adjust the ratio of high frequency and low frequency components adaptively, but also provide a small amount of equalization to middle frequency range. A half-rate speculative DFE, which is connected to the back of the CTLE, can satisfy the time constraints and eliminate the residual inter-symbol interference. The chip area including pads is about 1.2 mm² and the power consumption is about 750 mW under 3.3 V power supply. Measurement results show that the receiver chip can effectively equalize 24 dB loss at Nyquist frequency and a clear eye diagram can be captured at 36 Gb/s.