Development of a serial link transmitter for monolithic active pixel sensors

In this paper, a 5-Gbps serial link transmitter has been designed for monolithic active pixel sensor. The serial link is designed in a commercial 130-nm CMOS technology with a power supply of 1.2 V. The transmitter consists of a 16b/20b encoder, a three-stage 20:1 serializer core, the CML driver with pre-emphasis function, and a high-speed receiver to deal with the external clock. The root mean square jitter of this serial link transmitter is 2.2 ps, indicating a bit error rate of 1 × 10−14. This paper will discuss the design and performance of this serial link transmitter.