A 4.25-Gbps serializer ASIC in 180 nm for the monolithic active pixel sensor of the NICA-MPD inner tracker system

The Inner Tracker System(ITS) of the Multi-Purpose Detector (MPD) at Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility (NICA) is responsible for detecting charmed particles with average decay lengths (λ) of several hundred micrometers. Monolithic active pixel sensors are adopted in the inner tracker. A high speed serializer presented in this paper is used to convert the parallel data from the front end of the pixel sensor chip into serial data and transmit the serial data off chip. A test chip of the serializer has been manufactured in a 180 nm process and the preliminary tests have been done. During the tests, 10-channel parallel data with a data rate of 425 Mbps is injected into the chip. The test results show that the output data rate is 4.25 Gbps. The measured power consumption is about 55.8 mW under the power supply of 1.8 V including the receiver and current-mode-logic driver. The power consumption of the core circuitry is estimated to be about 31.5 mW. The measured total jitter is about 49.37 ps at a bit error rate (BER) of <1 × 10−12, and the output differential peak-to-peak value is up to 600 mV.