A 36 Gb/s wireline receiver with adaptive CTLE and 1-tap speculative DFE in 0.13 μm BiCMOS technology

This paper presents a 36 Gb/s receiver equalizer including an adaptive continuous time linear equalizer (CTLE), which is based on slope detection and a half-rate speculative decision feedback equalizer (DFE) in 0.13 mu m BiCMOS technology for high speed serial link. The CTLE with middle frequency compensation can not only adjust the ratio of high frequency and low frequency components adaptively, but also provide a small amount of equalization to middle frequency range. A half-rate speculative DFE, which is connected to the back of the CTLE, can satisfy the time constraints and eliminate the residual inter-symbol interference. The chip area including pads is about 1.2 mm 2 and the power consumption is about 750 mW under 3.3 V power supply. Measurement results show that the receiver chip can effectively equalize 24 dB loss at Nyquist frequency and a clear eye diagram can be captured at 36 Gb/s.