Design of high-speed wireline transceivers for backplane communications in 28nm CMOS

This paper describes the design of the architecture and circuit blocks for backplane communication transceivers. A channel study investigates the major challenges in the design of high-speed reconfigurable transceivers. Architectural solutions resolving channel-induced signal distortions are proposed and their effectiveness on various channels is investigated. Subsequently, the paper describes the design of a 0.6-13.1Gb/s fully-adaptive backplane transceiver embedded in state-of-the-art low-leakage 28nm CMOS FPGAs. The receiver front-end utilizes a 3-stage CTLE, a 7-tap speculative DFE, and a 4-tap sliding DFE to remove the immediate post-cursor ISI up to 64 taps. The clocking network provides continuous operation range between 0.6-13.1Gb/s. The transceiver achieves BER <; 10^-15 over a 31dB-loss backplane at 13.1Gb/s and over channels with 10GBASE-KR characteristics at 10.3125Gb/s.