A Self-Calibrating Per-Pin Phase Adjuster for Source Synchronous Double Data Rate Signaling in Parallel Interface

Abstract

A self-calibrating per-pin phase adjuster, which does not require any feedback from the slave chip and a multi-phase clock in the master and slave chips, is proposed for a high speed parallel chip-to-chip interface with a source synchronous double data rate (DDR) signaling. It achieves not only per-pin phase adjustment but also 90° phase shift of a strobe signal for a source synchronous DDR signaling. For this self-calibration, the phase adjuster measures and compensates the only relative mismatched delay among channels by utilizing on-chip time-domain reflectometry (TDR). Thus, variable delay lines, finite state machines, and a test signal generator are additionally required for the proposed phase adjuster. In addition, the power-gating receiver is used to reduce the discontinuity effect of the channel including parasitic components of chip package. To verify the proposed self-calibrating per-pin phase adjuster, the transceivers with 16 data, strobe, and clock signals for the interface with a source synchronous DDR signaling were implemented by using a 60nm 1-poly 3-metal CMOS DRAM process with a 1.5V supply. Each phase skew between Strobe and 16 Data was corrected within 0.028UI at 1.6-Gb/s data rate in a point-to-point channel.