This paper presents a high-speed single-ended 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) transceiver for next-generation memory interfaces, achieving a data rate of 32Gb/s. The proposed asymmetrically terminated PAM-4 driver is optimized for pseudo open drain (POD) channel configurations and improves signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) with a larger output swing. The dynamic logic-based high-speed 4-to-1 serializer enhances the transmitter output’s jitter characteristic by avoiding high-frequency components in the selection signals. The 4-tap feed-forward equalizer (FFE) with two operation modes and one sliding tap flexibly compensates for inter-symbol interference (ISI) of the channel. In the receiver frontend, a continuous-time linear equalizer (CTLE), which utilizes a trans-admittance stage (TAS) and a trans-impedance amplifier (TIA) with an inductive load, provides high-frequency boosting and robust single-to-differential conversion performance through the design techniques of current source gain-boosting and capacitive compensation. The low kickback noise comparators mitigate clock feedthrough and noise coupling during multi-phase PAM-4 sampling and embed the 1-tap PAM-4 decision feedback equalizer (DFE) operation by directly feeding back the previous sampling phase’s outputs. The transceiver prototype fabricated in 28-nm CMOS technology occupies 0.126 mm2. At 32 Gb/s, a bit error rate of under$10^{-12}$was achieved with a 6.25% eye margin and an energy efficiency of 3.37 pJ/bit while equalizing the 6.87-dB channel loss at 8 GHz.

Recently, wireless multimedia services have been growing because of the spread of various wireless applications. Hence, time division duplex (TDD) systems and their crossed-slot interference problems in a cellular environment have been attracting growing interests. Considering large signaling overhead between cells, decentralized time slot allocation (TSA) strategy is suitable for practical implementation. Thus, Fixed-TSA strategy which fixes the same ratio of uplink and downlink time slots in all cells is adopted in commercial WiBro systems (IEEE802.16e Mobile WiMax) to mitigate the crossed-slot interference. However, the Fixed-TSA strategy reduces the flexibility in time slot allocation due to a strong constraint set by a predefined boundary. Moreover, the mathematical derivation of the optimal value for the predefined boundary has not been presented yet. In this paper, we propose two decentralized TSA strategies. The first one is Enhanced Fixed-TSA strategy, which dynamically adapts the predefined boundary of the conventional Fixed-TSA strategy according to traffic conditions. The second one is region-based Decentralized Time Slot Allocation (RED-TSA) strategy, which utilizes partial location information of MSs to reduce crossedslot interference. We fully analyze the proposed TSA strategies in terms of new call blocking probability, average bit error probability, and the overall system throughput. Numerical results show that the proposed RED-TSA strategy provides the highest system throughput by compromising both new call blocking performance and average bit error performance, whereas it requires additional location information and complicated computation. On the contrary, the proposed Enhanced Fixed-TSA strategy requires reasonable computational complexity while it provides almost the same system throughput with that of the proposed RED-TSA strategy. In a nutshell, the proposed Enhanced Fixed- TSA strategy is more appropriate for the practical systems. Moreover, it can be directly applied to the current commercial WiMax/WiBro systems with minimum changes.