Abstract:
While some market segments have driven SerDes implementations towards DSP-heavy approaches, in many scenarios, analog/mixed-signal implementations continue to offer substantial potential benefits in terms of energy-efficiency. In this tutorial I will begin by briefly review the key factors that would drive one towards analog vs. digital SerDes implementations. I will then focus the remainder of the tutorial on key mixed-signal circuit techniques and link architectures that enable energy-efficient implementation of electrical interfaces operating at 56Gbs and beyond. Throughout the tutorial, practical examples and representative power/performance figures will be derived and/or drawn from publications; in particular, I will show how the combination of these techniques enabled realization of a 60Gb/s NRZ transceiver in a 65nm CMOS process at less than 5pJ/bit.


Biography: Elad Alon is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as a co-director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC). He is also a Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Blue Cheetah Analog Design, which is commercializing generator technologies in order to enable analog/mixed-signal solutions at lower barrier to entry. He has also held advisory, consulting, or visiting positions at Ayar Labs, Locix, Lion Semiconductor, Cadence, Xilinx, Wilocity (now Qualcomm), Oracle, Intel, AMD, Rambus, Hewlett Packard, and IBM Research, where he worked on digital, analog, and mixed-signal integrated circuits for computing, test and measurement, power management, and high-speed communications. His research focuses on energy-efficient integrated systems, including the circuit, device, communications, and optimization techniques used to design them. Prof. Alon received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2001, 2002, and 2006, respectively. He received the IBM Faculty Award in 2008, the 2009 Hellman Family Faculty Fund Award, as well as the 2010 and 2017 UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering Outstanding Teaching Awards, and has co-authored papers that received the 2010 ISSCC Jack Raper Award for Outstanding Technology Directions Paper, the 2011 Symposium on VLSI Circuits Best Student Paper Award, the 2012 as well as the 2013 Custom Integrated Circuits Conference Best Student Paper Awards, and 2010-2016 Symposium on VLSI Circuits Most Frequently Cited Paper Award.

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