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A CMOS PWM Transceiver Using Self-Referenced Edge Detection
Kiichi Niitsu, Yusuke Osawa, Naohiro Harigai, Daiki Hirabayashi, Osamu Kobayashi,
Takahiro J. Yamaguchi, and Haruo Kobayashi
Fig. 6. Schematic diagram of the proposed receiver with ECC capability for
Fig. 4. Conceptual diagram of the adaptive data-rate optimization and 1-bit PWM.
delay-line calibration associated with timing jitter measurement using self-
referenced edge detection.
Fig. 10. Measured waveform of the carrier clock, transmitted and received
data, and error code under nonsuccessive 1-bit error. ECC operation was
Fig. 8. Microphotograph of the test chips that are fabricated in 65-nm CMOS. successfully verified. Data rate is 3.2 Gb/s, and carrier clock frequency is
3.2 GHz.
Fig. 9. Measured waveform of the transmitted and received data with 2-bit Fig. 11. Measured waveform of the carrier clock, transmitted and received
PWM. A shifted PRBS was utilized, and RX data are inverted due to the test data, and error code under 2-bit successive error. Toggle pattern is utilized
chip design. Data rate is 3.2 Gb/s, and carrier clock frequency is 1.6 GHz. for verification. The proposed ECC cannot recover 2-bit successive error as
designed. Data rate is 3.2 Gb/s, and carrier clock frequency is 3.2 GHz.
V. T EST C HIP D ESIGN AND M EASUREMENT S ETUP Fig. 10 shows the measured waveform for verifying ECC operation.
To create a nonsuccessive 1-bit error situation, a carrier clock with
To verify the effectiveness of the proposed technique, a test chip large timing jitter of 1/16 probability was utilized. Large timing jitter
was fabricated using 65-nm CMOS technology, as shown in Fig. 8. was generated by changing the duty cycle. The ECC successfully
The footprints of the circuits are 20 μm × 27 μm (2-bit PWM, recovered the received data, and generated an error code with a
T = 15 ps, without ECC) and 20 μm × 39 μm (1-bit PWM, probability of 1/16.
T = 30 ps, with ECC). To confirm the multibit operation and Fig. 11 shows the measured waveform for demonstrating the
ECC feasibility separately, two types are implemented and tested. limitations of ECC operation. To create a 2-bit successive error
The common offset of the inverter-based delay line was shared situation, a carrier clock with a large timing jitter of 2/16 probability
by all delay lines for compact layout. An on-chip interconnect (two successive times every 16 cycles) was utilized. The ECC could
with a length of 3.2 μm was implemented as a communication not recover the received data as designed.
channel. The target application includes mobile application [3] and Performance summary is shown in Table I. Since the proposed
large-scale sensor array [4], [5], where communication channel is PWM transceiver does not require PLL nor delay locked loop (DLL)
short. circuits, the circuit area can be minimized. Even if considering
The input carrier clock and TX data were fed into the circuit technology scaling from 0.18-μm CMOS to 65-nm CMOS, the
by a BERTS (Agilent 81250, timing jitter is 1.6-ps RMS). Input proposed circuit is competitive from the viewpoint of area efficiency.
and output signals were captured with a sampling oscilloscope The BER measurement has been performed by carrier clock with
(Tektronix DSA71254B). lower jitter than these in other related works. However, the state-of-
the-art PLLs [9], [10] can generate subpicosecond jitter clock. Thus,
VI. M EASUREMENT R ESULT by associating with the low-jitter clock generator in TX, the proposed
Fig. 9 shows the measured waveform of the input and output signal. technique can be feasible without PLL or DLL in RX.
A carrier clock and shifted 2-bit pseudorandom bit sequence (PRBS)
VII. D ISCUSSION
were fed into the test chip. Data communication was successfully
verified with data rate of 3.2 Gb/s (=1.6 Gb/s/bit × 2 bit). The data A. Another Topology of the Proposed CMOS PWM Transceiver
rate is determined by the measurement setup. The maximum data Using Self-Referenced Edge Detection
rate of BERTS (Agilent 81250) is 3.2 Gb/s. High reliability with a This section introduces another topology of the proposed CMOS
BER < 10−12 was also verified with a BERTS. PWM transceiver using self-reference edge detection. Instead of
1148 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS, VOL. 23, NO. 6, JUNE 2015
using both rising and falling edges, another topology utilizes only
rising or falling edges. Since this topology can remove the limitation VIII. C ONCLUSION
of implementation, it expands the application of the proposed A CMOS PWM transceiver circuit using the self-referenced
technique. edge detection technique has been demonstrated for the first time.
Fig. 12 shows the conceptual image of another topology of the By comparing the self-delayed rising edge and modulated falling
proposed CMOS PWM transceiver using self-referenced edge detec- edge, edge detection was realized. This edge detection enables
tion. It is well known that the timing jitter can be expressed as the area-efficient and high-robustness for PWM communication without
accumulation of the period jitter [11]. By applying this characteristic exploiting PLLs. The data-rate optimization and ECC with inter-
to the PWM, PWM edges can be expressed by the accumulation of stage edge detection was introduced. Test chip was fabricated in
the period. For instance, when the previous bit is 0 and the period, 65-nm CMOS. The measured results have demonstrated 2-bit PWM
M−M+, is 00, the current data become 1, as shown in the bottom communication, high data rate (3.2 Gb/s), and high reliability
part of Fig. 12. (BER < 10−12 ) with small area occupation (540 μm2 ).
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