A Versatile and Efficient 0.1-to-11 Gb/s CML Transmitter in 40-nm CMOS

We present a wireline transmitter (TX) for re-configurable chip-to-chip links. The proposed design features a frequency-adaptive clock chain, a fast 16:1 clocked-CMOS multiplexer (C2MOS MUX) tree, and a full-rate synchronous current-mode logic (CML) clock driver. A prototype realized in 40-nm CMOS accomplishes a wide 0.1-to-11 Gb/s operation range (fmax/fmin = 110×). At 11 Gb/s, the prototype achieves 3.98 pJ/bit for a bit error rate (BER) < 10-12 with a 60.9-ps eye width.