10Gb/s serial I/O receiver based on variable reference ADC

ADC-based serial I/O receiver draws growing interest with technology scaling. Power consumption remains among the key issues for both the high-speed ADC and the high-throughput DSP. This paper presents an ADC-based receiver that relaxes the ADC requirements with a simple mixed-mode pre-equalizer. Variable ADC reference level compensates for both the frontend non-ideality and the channel response while maintaining low ADC resolution.