A 144 mW 76 Gb/s DAC-Based Discrete Multitone Wireline Transmitter in 5nm FinFET

Abstract

This paper presents a 76 Gb/s digital-to-analog converter (DAC)-based discrete multitone (DMT) wireline transmitter (TX) fabricated in 5 nm FinFET. Bit and power loading with 32/64/128-QAM across 31 orthogonal subchannels is demon-strated over a channel with 9.7 dB insertion loss (IL), achieving a bit error rate (BER) of 2.1 E-4. The prototype consumes 144 mW from 0.675 V digital and 0.725 V analog supplies, resulting in an energy efficiency of 1.89 pJ/b. An on-chip DSP performs subchannel-wise bit/power allocation and spectral shaping using a 64-tap inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) and cyclic prefix (CP) insertion. Compared to conventional PAM-based TXs, the proposed architecture provides improved bandwidth efficiency and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) through frequency-domain modulation and equalization. This work is the first demonstration of a DAC-based DMT TX at 76 Gb/s data rate fabricated in advanced CMOS technology.