Design of energy-efficient high-speed wireline transceiver

Energy efficiency has become the most important performance metric of integrated circuits used in many applications ranging from mobile devices to high-performance processors. The power problem permeates both computing and communication systems alike. Especially in the era of Big Data, continuously growing demand for higher communication bandwidth is driving the need for energy-efficient high-speed I/O serial links. However, the rate at which the energy efficiency of serial links is improving is much slower than the rate at which the required data transfer bandwidth is increasing. This dissertation explores two design approaches for energy-efficient communication systems. The first design approach maximizes the energy efficiency of a transceiver without any performance loss, and as a prototype, a source-synchronous multi-Gb/s transceiver that achieves excellent energy efficiency lower than 0.3pJ/bit is presented. To this end, the proposed transceiver employs aggressive supply voltage scaling, and multiplexed transmitter and receiver synchronized by low-rate multi-phase clocks are adopted to achieve high data rate even at a supply voltage close to the device threshold voltage. Phase spacing errors resulting from device mismatches are corrected using a self-calibration scheme. The proposed phase calibration method uses a single digital delay-locked loop (DLL) for calibrating all the phases, which makes the calibration process insensitive to the supply voltage level. Thanks to this technique, the proposed multi-Gb/s transceiver operates robustly and energy-efficiently at a very low supply voltage. Fabricated in a 65nm CMOS process, the energy efficiency and data rate of the prototype transceiver vary from 0.29pJ/bit to 0.58pJ/bit and 1Gb/s to 6Gb/s, respectively, as the supply voltage is varied from 0.45V to 0.7V. In the second approach, observing that the data traffic in a real system is bursty, a full-rate burst-mode transceiver that achieves rapid on/off operation needed for energy-proportional systems is presented. By injecting input data edges into the oscillator embedded in a classical type-II digital clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit, the proposed receiver achieves instantaneous phase-locking and input jitter filtering simultaneously. In other words, the proposed CDR combines the advantages of conventional feed-forward and feedback architectures to achieve energy-proportional operation. By controlling the number of data edges injected into the oscillator, both the jitter transfer bandwidth and the jitter tolerance corner are accurately controlled. The feedback loop also corrects for any frequency error and helps improve the CDR's immunity to oscillator frequency drift during the power-on and -off states. This also improves the CDR's tolerance to consecutive identical digits present in the input data. Fabricated in a 90nm CMOS process, the prototype receiver instantaneously locks onto the very first data edge and consumes 6.1mW at 2.2Gb/s. Owing to its short power-on time, the overall transceiver's energy efficiency varies only from 5.4pJ/bit to 10.7pJ/bit when the effective data rate is varied from 2.2Gb/s to 0.22Gb/s

최적에 가까운 타이밍 적응을 위해 치우친 데이터 레벨과 눈 경사 디텍터를 사용한 최대 눈크기추적 클럭 및 데이터 복원회로 설계

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·정보공학부, 2021. 2. 정덕균.이 논문에서는 최소-비트 비트 에러율 (BER)에 대한 최대 눈크기 추적 CDR (MET-CDR)의 설계가 제안되었다. 제안 된 CDR 은 최적의 샘플링 단계를 찾기 위해 반복 절차를 가진 BER 카운터 또는 아이 모니터가 필 요하지 않다. 에러 샘플러 출력에 가중치를 두어 더하여 얻은 치우친 데 이터 레벨 (biased dLev) 은 사전 커서 ISI(pre-cursor ISI) 의 정보도 고려한 눈 높이 정보를 추출한다. 델타 T 만큼의 시간 차이를 둔 지점에서 작동 하는 두 샘플러는 현재 눈 높이와 눈 기울기의 극성을 감지하고, 이 정보 를 통해 제안하는 CDR 은 눈 기울기가 0 이되는 최대 눈 높이로 수렴한 다. 측정 결과는 최대 눈 높이와 최소 BER 의 샘플링 위치가 잘 일치 함 을 보여준다. 28nm CMOS 공정으로 구현된 수신기 칩은 23.5dB 의 채널 손실이 있는 상태에서 26Gb/s 에서 동작 가능하다. 0.25UI 의 아이 오프닝 을 가지며, 87mW 의 파워를 소비한다.In this thesis, design of a maximum-eye-tracking CDR (MET-CDR) for minimum bit error rate (BER) is proposed. The proposed CDR does not require a BER coun-ter or an eye-opening monitor with any iterative procedure to find the near-optimal sampling phase. The biased data-level obtained from the weighted sum of error sampler outputs, UP and DN, extracts the actual eye height information in the presence of pre-cursor ISI. Two samplers operating on two slightly different tim-ings detect the current eye height and the polarity of the eye slope so that the CDR tracks the maximum eye height where the slope becomes zero. Measured results show that the sampling phase of the maximum eye height and that of the mini-mum BER match well. A prototype receiver fabricated in 28 nm CMOS process operates at 26 Gb/s with an eye-opening of 0.25 UI and consumes 87 mW while equalizing 23.5 dB of loss at 13 GHz.ABSTRACT I CONTENTS II LIST OF FIGURES IV LIST OF TABLES VIII CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 MOTIVATION 1 1.2 THESIS ORGANIZATION 4 CHAPTER 2 BACKGROUNDS 5 2.1 RECEIVER FRONT-END 5 2.1.1 CHANNEL 7 2.1.2 EQUALIZER 17 2.1.3 CDR 32 2.2 PRIOR ARTS ON CLOCK RECOVERY 39 2.2.1 BB-CDR 39 2.2.2 BER-BASED CDR 41 2.2.3 EOM-BASED CDR 44 2.3 CONCEPT OF THE PROPOSED CDR 47 CHAPTER 3 MAXIMUM-EYE-TRACKING CDR WITH BIASED DATA-LEVEL AND EYE SLOPE DETECTOR 49 3.1 OVERVIEW 49 3.2 DESIGN OF MET-CDR 50 3.2.1 EYE HEIGHT INFORMATION FROM BIASED DATA-LEVEL 50 3.2.2 EYE SLOPE DETECTOR AND ADAPTATION ALGORITHM 60 3.2.3 ARCHITECTURE AND IMPLEMENTATION 67 3.2.4 VERIFICATION OF THE ALGORITHM 71 3.2.5 ANALYSIS ON THE BIASED DATA-LEVEL 76 3.3 EXPANSION OF MET-CDR TO PAM4 SIGNALING 84 3.3.1 MET-CDR WITH PAM4 84 3.3.2 CONSIDERATIONS FOR PAM4 87 CHAPTER 4 MEASUREMENT RESULTS 89 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION 99 APPENDIX A MATLAB CODE FOR SIMULATING RECEIVER WITH MET-CDR 100 BIBLIOGRAPHY 105 초 록 113Docto

A 10Gb/s Full On-chip Bang-Bang Clock and Data Recovery System Using an Adaptive Loop Bandwidth Strategy

As demand for higher bandwidth I/O grows, the front end design of serial link becomes significant to overcome stringent timing requirements on noisy and bandwidthlimited channels. As a clock reconstructing module in a receiver, the recovered clock quality of Clock and Data Recovery is the main issue of the receiver performance. However, from unknown incoming jitter, it is difficult to optimize loop dynamics to minimize steady-state and dynamic jitter. In this thesis a 10 Gb/s adaptive loop bandwidth clock and data recovery circuit with on-chip loop filter is presented. The proposed system optimizes the loop bandwidth adaptively to minimize jitter so that it leads to an improved jitter tolerance performance. This architecture tunes the loop bandwidth by a factor of eight based on the phase information of incoming data. The resulting architecture performs as good as a maximum fixed loop bandwidth CDR while tracking high speed input jitter and as good as a minimum fixed bandwidth CDR while suppressing wide bandwidth steady-state jitter. By employing a mixed mode predictor, high updating rate loop bandwidth adaptation is achieved with low power consumption. Another relevant feature is that it integrates a typically large off-chip filter using a capacitance multiplication technique that employs dual charge pumps. The functionality of the proposed architecture has been verified through schematic and behavioral model simulations. In the simulation, the performance of jitter tolerance is confirmed that the proposed solution provides improved results and robustness to the variation of jitter profile. Its applicability to industrial standards is also verified by the jitter tolerance passing SONET OC-192 successfully

COMMUNICATION CHAIN SUB-BLOCK MODELLING AND IMPLEMENTATION IN FPGA

Současné obvody pro obnovu bitové synchronizace jsou stále ve většině případů založené na analogové smyčce fázového závěsu. Analogovou část obvodu je třeba pro každou výrobní technologii znovu navrhnout a migrace takového bloku mezi technologiemi je obtížná. V literatuře existují varianty obvodu CDR založené na asynchronním převzorkování, které jsou implementovány v čistě digitální technologii a jejich migrace je tak bezproblémová. Jako jejich hlavní nevýhody jsou uváděny vysoká složitost digitálního obvodu a menší přirozená odolnost těchto metod vůči jitteru přítomnému v signálu. Tato práce má za cíl ukázat, že tyto nevýhody plně digitálních obvodů CDR je možné překonat návrhem nových algoritmů a jejich optimalizací. Pro optimalizaci byly využity obvody FPGA, které umožňují měnit parametry zkoumaného obvodu v reálném čase (podobně jako při modelování na PC) a zároveň umožňují měření v reálných podmínkách, které je často obtížné modelovat. Rychlost měření je navíc mnohonásobně vyšší, než při použití simulace. Výstupem práce jsou optimalizované bloky CDR s výjimečně nízkými nároky na hardware a velmi malou spotřebou. Jejich chybovost je v reálných přenosových podmínkách zcela srovnatelná s běžnými obvody založenými na smyčce fázového závěsu. Tím byly odstraněny hlavní nevýhody plně digitálních obvodů CDR. Práce se dále zabývá měřením parametrů digitálních spojů. Byla vyvinuta nová metoda pro měření jitteru přímo v obvodu FPGA, která umožňuje charakterizovat přenosový kanál bez nutnosti připojení dalších přístrojů a tedy bez ovlivnění měřeného kanálu. Metoda vyžaduje jen použití minimálního množství hardwarových prostředků obvodu FPGA. Dále byl vyvinu specializovaný měřič distribuce chybovosti, který umožňuje podrobnou analýzu vlastností atmosférických optických spojů z hlediska možného protichybového zabezpečení přenosu dat. V návaznosti na tato měření byla navržena koncepce systému pro zabezpečení přenosu dat založeného na technice ARQ.Most modern clock and data recovery circuits (CDR) are based on analog blocks that need to be redesigned whenever the technology process is to be changed. On the other hand, CDR based blind oversampling architecture (BO-CDR) can be completely designed in a digital process which makes its migration very simple. The main disadvantages of the BO-CDR that are usually mentioned in a literature are complexity of its digital circuitry and finite phase resolution resulting in larger jitter sensitivity and higher error rate. This thesis will show that those problems can be solved by designing a new algorithm of BO-CDR and subsequent optimization. For this task an FPGA was selected as simulation and verification platform. This enables to change parameters of the optimized circuit in real time while measuring on real links (unlike a simulation using inaccurate link models). The output of this optimization is a new BO-CDR algorithm with heavily reduced complexity and very low error rate. A new FPGA-based method of jitter measurement was developed (primary for CDR analysis), which enables a quick link characterization without using probing or additional equipment. The new method requires only a minimum usage of FPGA resources. Finally, new measurement equipment was developed to measure bit error distribution on FSO links to be able to develop a suitable error correction scheme based on ARQ protocol.

Energy-efficient wireline transceivers

Power-efficient wireline transceivers are highly demanded by many applications in high performance computation and communication systems. Apart from transferring a wide range of data rates to satisfy the interconnect bandwidth requirement, the transceivers have very tight power budget and are expected to be fully integrated. This thesis explores enabling techniques to implement such transceivers in both circuit and system levels. Specifically, three prototypes will be presented: (1) a 5Gb/s reference-less clock and data recovery circuit (CDR) using phase-rotating phase-locked loop (PRPLL) to conduct phase control so as to break several fundamental trade-offs in conventional receivers; (2) a 4-10.5Gb/s continuous-rate CDR with novel frequency acquisition scheme based on bang-bang phase detector (BBPD) and a ring oscillator-based fractional-N PLL as the low noise wide range DCO in the CDR loop; (3) a source-synchronous energy-proportional link with dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) and rapid on/off (ROO) techniques to cut the link power wastage at system level. The receiver/transceiver architectures are highly digital and address the requirements of new receiver architecture development, wide operating range, and low power/area consumption while being fully integrated. Experimental results obtained from the prototypes attest the effectiveness of the proposed techniques

Toward realizing power scalable and energy proportional high-speed wireline links

Growing computational demand and proliferation of cloud computing has placed high-speed serial links at the center stage. Due to saturating energy efficiency improvements over the last five years, increasing the data throughput comes at the cost of power consumption. Conventionally, serial link power can be reduced by optimizing individual building blocks such as output drivers, receiver, or clock generation and distribution. However, this approach yields very limited efficiency improvement. This dissertation takes an alternative approach toward reducing the serial link power. Instead of optimizing the power of individual building blocks, power of the entire serial link is reduced by exploiting serial link usage by the applications. It has been demonstrated that serial links in servers are underutilized. On average, they are used only 15% of the time, i.e. these links are idle for approximately 85% of the time. Conventional links consume power during idle periods to maintain synchronization between the transmitter and the receiver. However, by powering-off the link when idle and powering it back when needed, power consumption of the serial link can be scaled proportionally to its utilization. This approach of rapid power state transitioning is known as the rapid-on/off approach. For the rapid-on/off to be effective, ideally the power-on time, off-state power, and power state transition energy must all be close to zero. However, in practice, it is very difficult to achieve these ideal conditions. Work presented in this dissertation addresses these challenges. When this research work was started (2011-12), there were only a couple of research papers available in the area of rapid-on/off links. Systematic study or design of a rapid power state transitioning in serial links was not available in the literature. Since rapid-on/off with nanoseconds granularity is not a standard in any wireline communication, even the popular test equipment does not support testing any such feature, neither any formal measurement methodology was available. All these circumstances made the beginning difficult. However, these challenges provided a unique opportunity to explore new architectural techniques and identify trade-offs. The key contributions of this dissertation are as follows. The first and foremost contribution is understanding the underlying limitations of saturating energy efficiency improvements in serial links and why there is a compelling need to find alternative ways to reduce the serial link power. The second contribution is to identify potential power saving techniques and evaluate the challenges they pose and the opportunities they present. The third contribution is the design of a 5Gb/s transmitter with a rapid-on/off feature. The transmitter achieves rapid-on/off capability in voltage mode output driver by using a fast-digital regulator, and in the clock multiplier by accurate frequency pre-setting and periodic reference insertion. To ease timing requirements, an improved edge replacement logic circuit for the clock multiplier is proposed. Mathematical modeling of power-on time as a function of various circuit parameters is also discussed. The proposed transmitter demonstrates energy proportional operation over wide variations of link utilization, and is, therefore, suitable for energy efficient links. Fabricated in 90nm CMOS technology, the voltage mode driver, and the clock multiplier achieve power-on-time of only 2ns and 10ns, respectively. This dissertation highlights key trade-off in the clock multiplier architecture, to achieve fast power-on-lock capability at the cost of jitter performance. The fourth contribution is the design of a 7GHz rapid-on/off LC-PLL based clock multi- plier. The phase locked loop (PLL) based multiplier was developed to overcome the limita- tions of the MDLL based approach. Proposed temperature compensated LC-PLL achieves power-on-lock in 1ns. The fifth and biggest contribution of this dissertation is the design of a 7Gb/s embedded clock transceiver, which achieves rapid-on/off capability in LC-PLL, current-mode transmit- ter and receiver. It was the first reported design of a complete transceiver, with an embedded clock architecture, having rapid-on/off capability. Background phase calibration technique in PLL and CDR phase calibration logic in the receiver enable instantaneous lock on power-on. The proposed transceiver demonstrates power scalability with a wide range of link utiliza- tion and, therefore, helps in improving overall system efficiency. Fabricated in 65nm CMOS technology, the 7Gb/s transceiver achieves power-on-lock in less than 20ns. The transceiver achieves power scaling by 44x (63.7mW-to-1.43mW) and energy efficiency degradation by only 2.2x (9.1pJ/bit-to-20.5pJ/bit), when the effective data rate (link utilization) changes by 100x (7Gb/s-to-70Mb/s). The sixth and final contribution is the design of a temperature sensor to compensate the frequency drifts due to temperature variations, during long power-off periods, in the fast power-on-lock LC-PLL. The proposed self-referenced VCO-based temperature sensor is designed with all digital logic gates and achieves low supply sensitivity. This sensor is suitable for integration in processor and DRAM environments. The proposed sensor works on the principle of directly converting temperature information to frequency and finally to digital bits. A novel sensing technique is proposed in which temperature information is acquired by creating a threshold voltage difference between the transistors used in the oscillators. Reduced supply sensitivity is achieved by employing junction capacitance, and the overhead of voltage regulators and an external ideal reference frequency is avoided. The effect of VCO phase noise on the sensor resolution is mathematically evaluated. Fabricated in the 65nm CMOS process, the prototype can operate with a supply ranging from 0.85V to 1.1V, and it achieves a supply sensitivity of 0.034oC/mV and an inaccuracy of ±0.9oC and ±2.3oC from 0-100oC after 2-point calibration, with and without static nonlinearity correction, respectively. It achieves a resolution of 0.3oC, resolution FoM of 0.3(nJ/conv)res2 , and measurement (conversion) time of 6.5μs