LARGE SWING INPUT EQUALIZATION SYSTEM DESIGN FOR HIGH SPEED DATA-LINKS

Abstract

In modern data links the increase in demand for high speed data transfer makes it much more challenging to receive data without losing portions of it. Equalization techniques are widely used to minimize the data-loss. Those techniques recover the signal which was distorted by imperfections of transmission lines such as inter-symbol interference (ISI), finite bandwidth, crosstalk, jitter, etc. The transmission line side effects and the known solutions to eliminate them are presented. The architecture is developed and simulated to cover the requirements of modern large swing data transfer applications.

The design architecture and the achieved results of the equalization system which can read both high and low common mode signals are presented. The proposed system has pFET and nFET-based inputs, which allow capturing large-swing input data. The results achieved with the proposed equalization architecture were compared with the initial results for evaluation.  

The input signal swing of the designed equalization system is enlarged by 350 mV. The proposed equalization system operates at ±10% of nominal value of supply voltage and temperature variations of [-40÷125] ^oC. The system is designed in 14 nm FinFET technology and verified using the Synopsys simulation tools. Compared with the common architecture systems maximum jitter is improved by up to 50%, when applying large swing data, causing only 10% rise of power consumption.