A 1.93-pJ/Bit PCI Express Gen4 PHY Transmitter with On-Chip Supply Regulators in 28 nm CMOS

This paper presents a fully integrated Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Express (PCIe) Gen4 physical layer (PHY) transmitter. The prototype chip is fabricated in a 28 nm low-power CMOS process, and the active area of the proposed transmitter is 0.23 mm2. To enable voltage scaling across wide operating rates from 2.5 Gb/s to 16 Gb/s, two on-chip supply regulators are included in the transmitter. At the same time, the regulators maintain the output impedance of the transmitter to meet the return loss specification of the PCIe, by including replica segments of the output driver and reference resistance in the regulator loop. A three-tap finite-impulse-response (FIR) equalization is implemented and, therefore, the transmitter provides more than 9.5 dB equalization which is required in the PCIe specification. At 16 Gb/s, the prototype chip achieves energy efficiency of 1.93 pJ/bit including all the interface, bias, and built-in self-test circuits.