Supply voltage reduction with process scaling has made the design of analog, RF and mixed mode circuits increasingly difficult. In this paper, we present the design of an ultra-low voltage, low power and highly integrated dual-mode receiver for 2.4-GHz ISM-band applications. The receiver operates reliably from 0.55-0.65 V and is compatible with commercial standards such as Bluetooth and ZigBee. We discuss the design challenges at low voltage supplies such as limited f T for transistors and higher nonlinearities due to limited available signal swing, and present the architectural and circuit level design techniques used to overcome these challenges. The highly integrated receiver prototype chip contains RF front-end circuits, analog baseband circuits and the RF frequency synthesizer and was fabricated in a standard digital 90-nm CMOS process; it achieves a gain of 67 dB, noise figure of 16 dB, IIP 3 of 10.5 dBm, synthesizer phase noise of 127 dBc/Hz at 3-MHz offset, consumes 32.5 mW from 0.6 V and occupies an active area of 1.7 mm 2 .

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Intel, Hillsboro, OREmerging standards in wireline communication are defining a path to data-rates of 40Gb/s and beyond. Most previous standards for these networking applications use NRZ signaling. However, practical signal integrity constraints have led to a renewed interest in also supporting PAM4 for some applications and loss profiles [1][2]. Recently, several transmitters have been reported that operate between 28 and 60Gb/s using NRZ or PAM4 modulation exclusively [2][3][4]. However, high-speed SerDes building blocks that support both a wide frequency range and multiple forms of modulation provide more compatibility between components and avoid the development of multiple IPs. In addition, these blocks must continue to scale into the next-generation of CMOS process technologies to lower the cost by reducing area and power consumption. This paper presents a dual-mode transmitter (TX) implemented in 14nm CMOS that supports both NRZ and PAM4 modulations and operates from 16 to 40Gb/s. The TX incorporates a 4-tap NRZ FIR filter that is reconfigurable to drive PAM4 levels, quarter-rate clocking with a high-bandwidth 4:1 serializer, a duty-cycle and quadrature-error correction circuit with statistical phase error detection, and compact, multi-layer T-coils for pad capacitance (C pad ) reduction.The TX block diagram is presented in Fig. 3.5.1. An on-chip pattern generator sends 8b parallel data to a mode selector through a 16:8 MUX. The data is further serialized for 4-tap FFE in NRZ mode or split into four 2b bundles (MSB and LSB) in PAM4 mode, and fed into the output stage that consists of 36 segments to cover equalization/modulation as well as PVT variation of the termination resistance. Each segment contains a retimer, an equalization (EQ) selector, a single-ended-to-differential (S2D) converter, a 4:1 serializer, a pre-driver, and a source-series terminated (SST) driver with a shared resistor. Figure 3.5.1 also illustrates the output stage segmentation for both NRZ and PAM4 modes. In NRZ mode, the segments are divided into three parts: cursor/1 st pre-cursor, cursor/2 nd pre-cursor, and cursor/post-cursor which contain ¼, ¼, and ½ of the total number of segments, respectively. The configurability of the NRZ TX taps supports a wide range of channel profiles while minimizing the number of segments. In PAM4 mode, the MSB is fed to ⅔ of the segments and the LSB is fed to ⅓ of the segments to generate four different voltage levels without providing equalization. The TX maintains quarter-rate clocking and operates at half the symbol rate of NRZ mode to maintain the same data and clock paths.While half-rate and quarter-rate architectures ideally consume the same CV 2 f power, a quarter-rate serialization scheme can be an attractive solution at very high data-rates because it relaxes the speed and timing requirements in the serializer. Figure 3.5.2 (a) shows the 4:1 serializer using back-to-back pass-gates. Compared to a 2:1 serializer, the 4:1 serializer relaxes the critical timing path by 2UI that is set by t ck-q ...

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