A 10-Gb/s/lane, Energy-Efficient Transceiver With Reference-Less Hybrid CDR for Mobile Display Link Interfaces

Abstract

This brief presents an energy-efficient transceiver supporting a 10-Gb/s/lane display link interface between the application processor (AP) integrated circuits (IC) and timing controller (TCON)-embedded source driver IC for mobile applications. An embedded clocking scheme is adopted to save clock distribution power, which also reduces the required number of off-chip I/O channels. A transmitter (TX) sends 20-Gb/s aggregate data through two differential data lanes, and a receiver recovers a 5-GHz half-rate clock. The TX employs a latch-less serializer using divided clocks in a staggered phase, achieving energy efficiency of 0.43 pJ/b/lane. In the RX, a hybrid clock and data recovery (CDR) tracks a half-data rate with a digital loop filter (DLF) and subsequently locks the frequency and phase with an analog loop filter (ALF). By deactivating the DLF and edge deserializer once a coarse frequency lock is acquired, the RX achieves an energy efficiency of 0.53 pJ/b/lane. The prototype transceiver, fabricated using a 28-nm CMOS technology, occupies an active area of 0.196 mm2 and achieves an energy efficiency of 1.23 pJ/b/lane, including a charge-pump phase-locked loop (CP-PLL) with clock distribution.