A 40–44 Gb/s 3× Oversampling CMOS CDR/1:16 DEMUX

A CMOS CDR and 1:16 DEMUX fabricated in a low-cost 90 nm bulk CMOS process operates at 40-44 Gb/s and dissipates 910 mW. A quarter-rate hybrid phase-tracking/3times blind-oversampling architecture is used to improve jitter tolerance, reduce the need for high-power CML circuits, and enable frequency acquisition without a reference clock. Input data are sampled using a 24-phase distributed VCO, and a digital CDR recovers 16 bits and a 2.5 GHz clock from 48 demultiplexed samples spanning 16 UI. Conformance to the ITU-T G.8251 jitter tolerance mask (BER <10^-12 with a 2³¹-1 PRBS source) is demonstrated using both an on-chip and an external BERT.