Power breakdown in a processing unit of a high-performance system or current multi-core processors used in server platforms shows a significant portion of power dissipation in transferring information from one point to the other. Serial link, serializer/deserializer (SERDES), data interconnect, or wireline transceiver (XCVR) commonly refer to the same block responsible for transferring information over a wired medium. The power consumption in the data transfer is one of the major bottlenecks in improving the performance.

Improving the performance of a serial link along one or more metrics like data rate, energy efficiency, or channel loss compensation is necessary. Still, more is needed for user-dependent processing platforms, which waste energy with ever-active links independent of workload requirements. Though the serial link is capable of peak throughput all the time, it is only used to its full capacity sometimes. The mismatch between the demand and capacity for serial links over a period of time leads to the potential avenues of research for saving energy without compromising on performance, which are explored in this research work.

Addressing the above design challenges, we first proposed a 0.1-10 Gb/s voltage-mode (VM) transmitter with reconfigurable 0.2-to-1.0 Vpp,diff output swings and a 2-tap FIR equalizer. Second, we proposed a rapid on/off (ROO) transmitter using a two-stage cascaded clock multiplier that generates a 2.46-4.92 GHz clock from 38.4 MHz clock source. Also, the TX incorporated a VM output driver with fast-on regulators for 0.1-1.0 V output swings, 2-tap FIR equalizer, and fixed output impedance. The ROO clock multiplier and wide range of output swings help optimize the power consumption based on channel loss and data transmission latency while extending average data rates to below 500 Mb/s.

Third, we proposed a ROO 0.63-7.5 Gb/s digital CDR, which employs a fast-on 1.875- 3.75 GHz DCO followed by a 2X integer-N PLL. The DCO incorporates an eight-bit digitally controlled phase interpolator embedded in a 6-12X injection-locked clock multiplier for fast turn-on and low output jitter. Duty-cycling the CDR operation lowers the average data rates to 0.63 Gb/s with less than 55 ns turn-on time and 1.6