This paper presents a 40-Gb/s transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) chipset for chip-to-chip communications in a 65-nm CMOS process. The TX implements a quarter-rate multi-multiplexer (MUX)-based four-tap feed-forward equalizer (FFE), where a charge-sharing-effect elimination technique is introduced into the 4:1 MUX to optimize its jitter performance and power efficiency. The RX employs a two-stage continuous-time linear equalizer as the analog front end and integrates a low-cost sign-based zero-forcing engine relying on edge-data correlation to automatically adjust the tap weights of the TX-FFE. By embedding low-pass filters with an adaptively adjusting bandwidth into the data-sampling path and adopting high-linearity compensating phase interpolators, the clock data recovery achieves both high jitter tolerance and low jitter generation. The fabricated TX and RX chipset delivers 40-Gb/s PRBS data at BER <; 10-12 over a channel with >16-dB loss at half-baud frequency, while consuming a total power of 370 mW.