Intel Corporation

Kai Yu

Frank Patrick O'Mahony

Stephen Kim

Ajay Balankutty

Jihwan Kim

Sandipan Kundu

Bong Chan Kim

Yutao Liu

Gurmukh Singh

Richard Packard

A quadrature clock generator that takes advantage of the inherently low delay of a shunt-series inductively peaked clock buffer to generate quadrature clocks with the high jitter performance using just one additional stage in Q path compared to I path. The generator includes a delay cell that uses shunt-series peaking and uses a resistive DAC in series with the shunt inductor to provide a large delay range with good jitter characteristics. The resistive DAC can be placed near a real or a virtual ground to minimize capacitive loading on the signal path. This delay cell can provide greater than 2× delay tuning range and is suitable for clocks at high frequencies. This delay cell can also be used as a ring oscillator with large frequency tuning range. A low voltage differential signaling termination switch control that uses feed forward mechanism to control termination impedance of device in a receiver.

Wide-range inductor-based delay-cell and area efficient termination switch control

An apparatus enables a high-bandwidth 4-way data serializing (4:1 serializer) digital-to-analog converter. The apparatus uses active inductor-based bandwidth extension technique for two-stage driver enabling design of quarter-rate 4-way data serializing transmitter. The 4:1 serializer output bandwidth is extended by gate-resistor-peaked n-type transistor load working as an active inductor. A current steering switch with current source is used as the final driver. The 4:1 serializer includes a pulse width tuning technique with tunable ground voltage on the ground terminal of a pulse generator to tune an effective threshold voltage of the pulse generator. A Bessel-like LC filter is coupled to an output of the 4:1 serializer. The filter includes shunt peaking paths that provide zeros, which natively cancel large parasitic capacitance at a shunt peaking node. As such, active and passive devices including driver circuitry, ESD diodes, and any other sensing circuitry are flexibly added on any LC filter nodes.

Active inductor based high-bandwidth 2-state 4-way data serialization apparatus and method

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Portland, OR, United States of America

Kai Yu