Since its official release, PCIe (PCI-Express) has evolved rapidly and has become an indispensable technology for high-performance computer (HPC) communications [
1], Ethernet, industrial control, etc. The release of the PCIe 6.0 specification has dramatically increased computing speeds for applications such as HPC, cloud computing, and data center solid state drives (SSD), but with that comes the negative impact of the channel on clock signals and transmitted data. Severe signal attenuation and interference limit the overall performance of PCIe 6.0, especially on the receiving end where signal integrity and transmission latency are greatly affected. As shown in
Figure 1, Retimer, a technology for data synchronization and transmission, plays a key role in the physical layer of the PCIe 6.0 interface subsystem and is expected to be the primary solution in the PCIe 6.0 era with its better performance and more economical processing.
Since PCIe 3.0, the data rate has doubled with each new generation of the standard. PCIe 6.0 has increased the data transfer rate to 64GT/s, and the single channel bandwidth has reached 63.02Gbps. Retimer, as a PHY chip, needs to be compatible with various key technologies such as serialization and deserialization, clock generation and distribution, clock data recovery, data drive and equalization, etc. For the ultra-high speed input signal of 100Gbps or more, the synchronization signal still has large jitter and signal transmission also has large latency. In the circuit design, when there is a latency difference between the clock and data path, the correlation of the clock to data sampling is weakened [
2], resulting in an increase in the correlation jitter between the clock and data path, which reduces the jitter tolerance. Therefore, many studies have minimized the delay matching between clock and data through clock sampling and forwarding techniques, which in turn achieve noise filtering and jitter cancellation. In [
2], the receiver-side clock path uses a high-bandwidth filtered PLL to track data-related jitter and cut off high-frequency jitter, but this method does not guarantee that the PLL output clock and data path are at the same frequency; the literature [
3] uses a Multiplying Delay Looked Loop (MDLL) to reset the oscillator jitter at the rate of the reference clock frequency, which does not require a high bandwidth loop to suppress oscillator jitter, reducing the complexity of the design, but this can subject the MDLL to large duty cycle distortion. A region-efficient phase filtering technique is proposed in [
4] to filter jitter between cascaded repeaters, but the noise environment is not fundamentally eliminated and the jitter accumulated by subsequent cascaded circuits degrades the system performance and jitter tolerance. To reduce the output jitter, [
5] uses a Retimer design with symmetric layout, reduces the differential coupling capacitance, adjusts the serial data and clock phase into the Retimer by a phase regulator with the help of an external control signal, and provides the clock drive for the Retimer, but this design cannot eliminate the phase difference between data and clock, and also increases the circuit penetration latency. In the literature [
6], a retiming driver based on Clock And Data Recovery (CDR) + Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) architecture is designed for 50 Gbps PAM4 (Pulse-Amplitude - Modulation-4) signal; To address the challenges posed by signal characteristics, skinning effects, dielectric losses, and inter-symbol crosstalk, the Retimer of the repeater type was chosen as the signal conditioning technique in the literature [
7]. The Retimer consists of a receiver and a driver that uses the clock recovered from the data stream by the CDR or a reference clock to achieve synchronous driving of the data. The literature [
8] proposes a PAM4 transceiver architecture based on Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) + Digital Signal Processor (DSP), which makes the channel equalization capability greater than 40 dB for solving the encapsulation insertion loss caused in long distance transmission .In [
9], an FPGA-based low-latency transfer scheme is used to achieve high-speed data transfer between the FPGA platform and the server. However, this scheme does not consider the data compression process which is more time consuming for transmission and the data transfer rate is still at a low level. A low latency forward error correction coding was proposed in [
10],this technique has too much resource overhead in the coding layer.
In this paper, we propose a new Retimer solution to address the problem of latency and jitter in high-speed data transmission, in order to recover low-jitter data at the SerDes receiver and reduce the latency of data transmission in subsequent circuits.