Low power, high performance current mode transceiver for Network-on-Chip communication

Abstract

In literature, for network on-chip communications, voltage mode and current mode transceivers have been proposed to achieve high performance. In voltage mode transceivers the signal swing is more, which makes the link power high and also limits the bandwidth. Hence, the current mode signaling can be a solution for better performance than voltage mode signaling in terms of delay and power. This paper presents a modified low power, high performance current mode transceiver, which suits for network on chip communication (NoC). The proposed transceiver circuit is implemented in UMC 180nm technology using Cadence spectre tool. From the post layout simulations, it is observed that, the proposed transmitter circuit has a signal swing of 80mV, which is 1.5 times less for normal transistor sizes comparing to the existing circuit. The proposed current mode sense amplifier, which acts as a receiver is able to sense up to an input signal swing of 20mV, which is less by a factor of 2.5 than the reported circuit. The delay of the proposed current mode sense amplifier is less than 50psec, where as for the receiver reported in literature it is 80psec.