Mohammadreza Esmaeilpour, Marco Mestice, Jan Lappas, Christian Weis, Norbert Wehn

• In this paper, a 15 Gb/s single-ended active inductive linear equalizer with an improved gain-enhancing method is presented. The proposed architecture consists of an activeinductive single-stage continuous-time linear equalizer (CTLE) to compensate for the high-frequency channel loss followed by a common-source stage with resistive load to generate a noninverting output as well as enhance the signal swing and sampling margin. Furthermore, an optimized gain-enhancing technique is introduced in the CTLE stage which noticeably improves the low-frequency gain and the output signal swing. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed gain-enhanced CTLE, two common active-inductive CTLE approaches were designed and simulated in 12nm FinFET technology to compare with the proposed architecture. The simulation results show that the proposed gain-enhancing technique improves the output signal swing of the CTLE by 30% compared to the state-of-the-art with no power and area overhead. The proposed equalizer draws 1.74 mW at a Nyquist frequency of 7.5 GHz and a supply voltage of 0.8 V. In addition, it compensates for a channel attenuation of 22 dB with a figure-of-merit (FoM) of 5.27 fJ/bit/dB, indicating a considerable improvement over previous studies.