The object of this research is to develop robust wire-line systems which demonstrate high performance while simultaneously consuming low power. Most high performance designs come at the expense of high power consumption, while low power designs typically are not as robust as high power architectures. These problems have retarded the development of multi-gigabit wire-line systems. In this thesis, a holistic approach consisting of a system-level architecture modification, along with circuit-level innovations and optimizations has been presented to circumvent the stated problems. The main focus of this work is the Clock and Data Recovery (CDR) system which is the primary circuit of any modern wire-line transceiver. Ultra high-speed wire-line systems require high performance broadband amplifiers and buffers. A 62 GHz bandwidth amplifier has been presented to address this need. Package radiation and terrestrial radiation are liable to degrade the bit error rate (BER) of CDRs, especially high-speed ones. The scaling of process technology further exacerbates this issue. A new technique has been proposed to improve the radiation immunity of the latch, which is the block that is most sensitive to radiation. PLL-based CDRs are challenging to design at very high speeds and are also incapable of true burst-mode operation due to their substantial lock time. Injection-lock based clock recovery was investigated as an alternative to PLL based CDRs. Injection-locking can acquire the clock almost instantaneously from the data stream, and hence would be ideal for burst-mode communication. The investigation yielded the vulnerability of the method to jitter (false-locking and high jitter transfer), the attenuation of which is critical to commercial CDRs. PLL-based reference-less CDRs have traditionally suffered from the problem of false-locking, which is a major hindrance to the widespread use of such systems, albeit the cause of this is repetitive patterns occurring in data. A novel false-lock detector system has been proposed and demonstrated for the first time as a robust solution to this issue. The implementation of the final CDR system required the use of an L-C tank VCO, the components of which are generic for all commercial CDRs. A new systematic layout technique for the VCO has been proposed and demonstrated in this work to substantially improve the layout area and the associated parasitics, approximately by 70%. This new layout addresses a critical yet often neglected part of VCO design. Furthermore, a new concept has been proposed to optimize static dividers with respect to their power consumption and number of devices.