A 6-b 1.6-GS/s ADC With Redundant Cycle One-Tap Embedded DFE in 90-nm CMOS Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • ADC-BASED serial link receivers are emerging in order to scale data rates over high attenuation channels. Embedding partial equalization inside the front-end ADC can potentially result in lowering the complexity of back-end DSP and/or decreasing the ADC resolution requirement, which results in a more energy-efficient receiver. This paper presents a 6-b 1.6-GS/s ADC with a novel embedded DFE structure. A redundant cycle technique is proposed for a time-interleaved SAR ADC, which relaxes the DFE feedback critical path delay with low power/area overhead. The 6-b prototype ADC with embedded one-tap DFE is fabricated in an LP 90-nm CMOS process and achieves 4.75-bits peak ENOB and 0.46 pJ/conv.-step FOM at a 1.6-GS/s sampling rate. Enabling the embedded DFE while operating at 1.6 Gb/s over a 46-in FR4 channel with 14-dB loss at Nyquist bandwidth opens a previously closed eye and allows for a 0.2 UI timing margin at a BER = 10-9. Total ADC power including front-end T/Hs and reference buffers is 20.1 mW, and the core time-interleaved ADC occupies 0.24 mm 2 area. 1966-2012 IEEE.

published proceedings

  • IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS

author list (cited authors)

  • Tabasy, E. Z., Shafik, A., Huang, S., Yang, N., Hoyos, S., & Palermo, S.

citation count

  • 14

complete list of authors

  • Tabasy, Ehsan Zhian||Shafik, Ayman||Huang, Shan||Yang, Noah Hae-Woong||Hoyos, Sebastian||Palermo, Samuel

publication date

  • August 2013