A DSP-based low-power 12.5Gb/s SerDes using a baud-rate ADC and a digital data-path is developed for backplane data communication. A digital 2-tap FFE and a 5-tap DFE in the RX provide channel compensation. A BER of <10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-15</sup> is measured over legacy backplanes with 24dB loss at Nyquist. The power consumption and die area are 330mW and 0.45mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> per TX/RX pair