The development of on-chip serial link transmitter for MAPS

Most applications of future CMOS Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) require high-speed digital serial data link for data transmission. Commercial monolithic serial transmitters can be found that meet the bandwidth requirements of the MAPS. However, there is no available space for additional chips on the MAPS layers in the detector. To address this issue, a serial transmitter prototype, containing a phase-locked loop (PLL) clock generator, an 8B/10B encoder, a serializer and a low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) driver was developed. Since the clock is embedded into the data by using serial transmission, the detector material budget due to data transmission is minimized. The serial transmitter prototype is integrated in a sensor chip, MIMOSA26, developed in IPHC (Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert-Curien, France). It has been implemented in a 0.35 m CMOS technology. This first serial transmitter prototype was designed aiming to transmit data at 160 Mbit/s. Measurements proved our design is fully functional.