A 16.7-Gb/s full-transition avoidance PAM-4 2-tap FFE transmitter with shunt switches for display interfaces

This paper describes a channel-loss-tolerant 16.7-Gb/s PAM-4 transmitter with feed-forward equalization (FFE) for display interfaces. The proposed transmitter adopts full transition avoidance (FTA) coding in combination with the 2-tap FFE to enhance the worst-case horizontal eye-opening in the presence of inter-symbol interference (ISI) and shunt switches to reduce power consumption. The transmitter test chip was fabricated in a 28-nm CMOS process and occupied 0.04 mm2. The design achieved 16.7-Gb/s (corresponding to 10 Gbaud/s) with a 0.20x wider horizontal eye-opening for a >7.2 dB loss channel while consuming 107.6mW (corresponding to 6.4 pJ/bit) from the 1.2-V supply.