This work describes the design of a transmitter for a
10 Gbps serial interface to be used in automotive Electronic Control
Units. The data rate is chosen in order to assess the design
challenges in automotive environment at this frequency. The focus
will be mainly on challenges related to transistor level design
using a standard 28 nm technology, nevertheless a system level
overview will be also given. The proposed transmitter features
feed-forward equalization with 8 taps (1 pre-cursor and 6 postcursors,
plus the main tap), whose strength is programmable with
16 discretization steps, optimizing the transmitter adaptability
with reduced area. The proposed architecture is also able to
tune its output impedance independently from the choice of the
weights of the equalization tap. It features a 300 mV peak-topeak
eye diagram with 16 equalization levels and achieves a
remarkably low 2.25 pJ/bit total power consumption (0.633 pJ/bit
for the predriver+driver).
