With the great improvement in data transmission rate requirements, the analog-to-digital converter (ADC)-based wireline receiver has received more attention due to its flexible and powerful equalization capability. Time-interleaved ADC (TI-ADC) is the most commonly used architecture in high-speed ADC-based receivers. One of the major challenges in TI-ADC is the timing mismatch between the parallel sub-ADCs. The traditional skew detection and calibration circuits consume substantial power and area of the receiver system. In this article, we propose a novel calibration method using the autocorrelation principle combined with an existing Mueller–Müller clock and data recovery circuit (MM-CDR). This new method reuses the existing error-direction information of the MM-CDR in the ADC-based wireline receiver and combines the autocorrelation principle to obtain the timing mismatch information in the TI-ADC without adding an additional skew deviation extraction circuit, which greatly reduces the area and power consumption. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our skew calibration method, we designed a complete ADC-based wireline receiver circuit using the 28 nm CMOS technology. The simulation results show that our proposed calibration method could obtain 0.193 sensitivity per 1% skew, which was superior to traditional calibration methods. To verify the speed and accuracy of the convergence of our calibration method, the initial skews were set to +0.4 ps, +0.2 ps, −0.59 ps, and 0 ps for our 4 × 8 TI-ADC; the spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) and signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SNDR) of the ADC were increased from 37.24 dB and 31.28 dB to 48.07 dB and 34.56 dB, respectively, after timing calibration with a 50 fs step. In order to compare the area and power consumption required by different skew calibration methods, we synthesized the expressions of various methods using the 28 nm CMOS technology, and the area and power consumption of our proposed skew calibration loop were 695 μm2 and 0.126 mW, respectively, which were the smallest among these methods.

With the great increases in data transmission rate requirements, analog-to-digital converter (ADC)-based wireline receivers have received more and more attention due to their flexible and powerful equalization capabilities. Considering power consumption, baud-rate Mueller–Muller clock and data recovery (MM-CDR) circuits are widely used in ADC-based wireline receivers since MM-CDR circuits only need one sample signal per unit interval (UI). However, MM-CDR circuits need to set an additional Vref voltage to match the size of the main tap of the channel. If the Vref matching is not appropriate or the signal quality is good as a square wave, MM-CDR circuits cannot accurately lock on to a certain phase and instead drift within a phase range. Therefore, MM-CDR circuits are not as robust and stable as oversampled CDR circuits. In this study, a digital bang-bang clock and data recovery (DBB-CDR) circuit combined with an ADC-based wireline receiver was proposed. The DBB-CDR circuit could eliminate various unstable factors of MM-CDR circuits and achieve fast and robust phase locking without excessively increasing power consumption. A model of the DBB-CDR circuit was combined with an actual 32 Gb/s ADC-based wireline receiver, which was implemented in 28 nm CMOS technology to analyze the performance of the DBB-CDR circuit. The simulation results showed that the DBB-CDR circuit could achieve 0.42 UIpp JTOL@10MHz, and that the minimum JTOL value was 0.362 UIpp under a 0.04 UI variance of Gaussian jitter. The area and power consumption of the DBB-CDR circuit were only 64 μm2 and 0.02 mW, respectively; and the DBB-CDR circuit could also obtain very stable phase locking and demonstrated a fast frequency offset tracking ability when there was a frequency offset.