The World's First Working 7nm 112G Long Reach SerDes Silicon

By Cadence

October 24, 2018

At the start of November last year, Cadence announced that it was acquiring nusemi, a company focused on the development of high-speed SerDes interfaces. Today, Cadence demonstrated working 7nm SerDes testchips running at 112 Gbps.

It is hard to comprehend speeds like this. One way is to slow your computer's clock down to 1 Hz as I did in my post Numbers Everyone Should Know. Similarly, here, if we scale so that one bit is transmitted per second, it takes 3,500 years to transmit one second's worth of bits. It really is an incredibly high datarate.

SerDes stands for serializer-deserializer. They are really two separate devices, the transmitter (serializer) and receiver (deserializer), although they are usually used in pairs to provide bidirectional communication. There are two separate reasons that SerDes have become so important in semiconductor design.

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