A 20-Gb/s charge-steering equalizer utilizing highly-efficient charge-steering linear equalizer

Abstract

The need for high-speed low-power receivers has grown due to the large increase in data rates and Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Equalizer-based receivers contain mainly two types of equalizers; Continuous-Time-Linear-Equalizers (CTLE) and non-linear equalizers implemented as Decision-Feedback-Equalizers (DFE). Many solutions have been introduced in the literature to enhance the power consumption of DFEs by using time interleaving or charge-steering. Still, the CTLE power consumption remains considerable a big portion of the overall power of the equalizer-based receivers. The CTLE function cannot be neglected as it equalizes the pre-cursors. This paper presents a low-power charge-steering based receiver that consists of a 1/8-rate charge-steering DFE integrated with a newly proposed Charge-Steering-Linear-Equalizer (CSLE). The proposed CSLE is explained qualitatively and quantitatively. The entire receiver chain consumes 2.9-mW running from a 0.9-V supply and can compensate for 14-dB channel loss at Nyquist-rate when processing 20-Gb/s data.