Publications

2024

1. SerDes

   A 4x6.25-Gbs Serial Link Transmitter Core in 0.18-μm CMOS for high-speed front-end ASICs

   Real Time, 2024

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   In this paper, a 4x6.25 Gbps serial link transmitter core has been designed for high-speed front-end ASICs. The transmitter core is implemented in a commercial 0.18 um CMOS technology. The core consists of a common PLL and four individual transmitter channels. Each channel contains a 2-stage 20:2 serializer, a 2-stage half-rate feed-forward equalizer and a clock manager circuit. A new architecture of the clock and data path is proposed, and the overall power consumption is reduced by 40% compared with previous works. At a data rate of 6.25 Gbps, the simulation results show that the PLL and transmitter feature a phase jitter of 1.3 ps RMS and 11.2 ps pk-pk respectively. The 4-channel transmitter core occupies 0.44 mm2 and dissipates 27.7 mW/Gbps from 1.8 V supply. The chip is being packaged and will be tested soon in December.

2. Chem

   Thiol Ligand-Modified Au for Highly Efficient Electroreduction of Nitrate to Ammoniar

   Precious Chemistry, 2024

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   Electroreduction of nitrate (NO3-) to ammonia (NH3) is an environmentally friendly route for NH3 production, serving as an appealing alternative to the Haber–Bosch process. Recently, various noble metal-based electrocatalysts have been reported for electroreduction of NO3–. However, the application of pure metal electrocatalysts is still limited by unsatisfactory performance, owing to the weak adsorption of nitrogen-containing intermediates on the surface of pure metal electrocatalysts. In this work, we report thiol ligand-modified Au nanoparticles as the effective electrocatalysts toward electroreduction of NO3–. Specifically, three mercaptobenzoic acid (MBA) isomers, thiosalicylic acid (ortho-MBA), 3-mercaptobenzoic acid (meta-MBA), and 4-mercaptobenzoic acid (para-MBA), were employed to modify the surface of the Au nanocatalyst. During the NO3– electroreduction, para-MBA modified Au (denoted as para-Au/C) displayed the highest catalytic activity among these Au-based catalysts. At −1.0 V versus reversible hydrogen electrode (vs RHE), para-Au/C exhibited a partial current density for NH3 of 472.2 mA cm–2, which was 1.7 times that of the pristine Au catalyst. Meanwhile, the Faradaic efficiency (FE) for NH3 reached 98.7% at −1.0 V vs RHE for para-Au/C. The modification of para-MBA significantly improved the intrinsic activity of the Au/C catalyst, thus accelerating the kinetics of NO3– reduction and giving rise to a high NH3 yield rate of para-Au/C.