Industry Expert Blogs

In any advanced node, one of the most important pieces of IP is a high-performance SerDes PHY. Of course, what counts as high-performance depends on the node. At the current 16nm node, 16Gbps is the sweet spot. The reason that SerDes is so important is that almost all interface IP such as PCIe, USB, SATA, and more rely on a SerDes PHY to handle the interfaces between the SoC and the outside world. A clean PHY is one where the signals are well enough shaped that decoding them at the receiver works flawlessly. I'm sure you've seen plenty of eye diagrams showing off how clean the signal is with a large eye so that the difference between a 1 and a 0 is clearly detectable.

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