Energy Efficient Voltage-Mode Simultaneous Bidirectional Transceiver for Serial Links

This paper presents a single-ended voltage-mode (VM) simultaneous bidirectional (SBD) transceiver for chip-to-chip interconnects. A hybrid network in the receive path cancels the transmitted signal to extract the received signal enabling SBD signaling. The conventional source-series terminated (SST) and trans-impedance amplifier (TIA)-based transmitters used in the SBD signaling transceivers consume high power to minimize output impedance variation. The proposed design minimize this variation with low power consumption, thereby leading to a low-power transceiver. In addition, the power consumption while incorporating feed-forward equalizer (FFE) is reduced by using current-mode implementation in the proposed transceiver. Implemented using TSMC PDK in 65 nm technology, the simulation results gives an energy efficiency of 0.35 pJ/b at 20 Gb/s SBD data-rate.