A 0.36 pJ/bit, 0.025 mm2 12.5 Gb/s Forwarded-Clock Receiver with a Stuck-Free Delay-Locked Loop and a Half-Bit Delay Line in 65-nm CMOS Technology

This paper describes a power and area-efficient forwarded-clock (FC) receiver and includes an analysis of the jitter tolerance of the FC receiver. In the proposed design, jitter tolerance is maximized according to the analysis by employing a delay-locked loop (DLL) based de-skewing. A sample-swapping bang-bang phase-detector (SS-BBPD) eliminates the stuck locking caused by the finite delay range of the voltage-controlled delay line (VCDL), and also reduces the required delay range of the VCDL by half. The proposed FC receiver is fabricated in 65-nm CMOS technology and occupies an active area of 0.025 mm². At a data rate of 12.5 Gb/s, the proposed FC receiver exhibits an energy efficiency of 0.36 pJ/bit, and tolerates 1.4-\text{UI}-{\mathrm{pp}} sinusoidal jitter of 300 MHz.