A low-swing differential near-ground signaling (NGS) transceiver for low-power high-speed mobile I/O interface is presented. The proposed transmitter adopts an on-chip regulated programmable-swing voltage-mode driver and a pre-driver with asymmetric rising/falling time. The proposed receiver utilizes a new multiple gain-path differential amplifier with feed-forward capacitors that boost high-frequency gain. Also, the receiver incorporates a new adaptive bias generator to compensate the input common-mode variation due to the variable output swing of the transmitter and to minimize the current mismatch of the receiver's input stage amplifier. The use of the new simple and effective impedance matching techniques applied in the transmitter and receiver results in good signal integrity and high power efficiency. The proposed transceiver designed in a 65-nm CMOS technology achieves a data rate of 13 Gbps/channel and 0.3 pJ/bit (= 0.3 mW/Gbps) high power efficiency over a 10 cm FR4 printed circuit board.

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