Texas Instruments (United Kingdom)

The challenge facing SerDes (Serialiser De-Serialiser) designers is common with all current communications technologies. Industry advances show a trend to increase speed, reduce power and improve efficiency. In this article a novel line driver that can operate at speeds of up to 40 Gbps with a power supply of 1 V and a power consumption of 4.54 mW/Gb/s is presented. Pre-distortion on the front-end is used to maintain signal integrity.

A DSP-based low-power 12.5Gb/s SerDes using a baud-rate ADC and a digital data-path is developed for backplane data communication. A digital 2-tap FFE and a 5-tap DFE in the RX provide channel compensation. A BER of <10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-15</sup> is measured over legacy backplanes with 24dB loss at Nyquist. The power consumption and die area are 330mW and 0.45mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> per TX/RX pair

Texas Instruments Europe adopted the EFQM business excellence model in 1993, and in the same year its entire European operations underwent a Self assessment to the model’s criteria. The company applied for the European Quality Award for the first time in 1994 and achieved finalist status. In 1995, it was named winner of the European Quality Award.