A 353mW 112Gb/s Discrete Multitone Wireline Receiver Datapath with Time-Based ADC in 5nm FinFET

Abstract

The growing demand for higher communication bandwidth between processors through wired interconnects in large-scale servers has been driving the need to increase the per-lane data rate beyond the current 112Gb/s. Discrete multitone (DMT) modulation provides robustness against nonlinear channels having ability to individually allocate bit information to multiple frequency-domain orthogonal subchannels depending on the subchannel signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SNDR). This paper presents a 112Gb/s DMT RX datapath with time-interleaved (TI) time-based (TB) ADC optimized for compact area. The demonstrated performance showcases the viability of DMT techniques in the presence of a sharp notch in the channel and its energy efficiency when combined with a digital friendly time-based sub-ADC operating at low voltage.