Giga-bit CMOS equalizers for high-speed data links
Consumer electronics are experiencing an explosive growth in bandwidth requirements. This growth is driven by demand for fiber-to-the-home Internet connections, the increasing capabilities of in-home consumer devices as well as the demands of multimedia recording and playback in mobile devices. However, traditional copper channels and previous generations of optical fiber experience dispersive effects at data rates above 1 Gbps, leading to inter-symbol interference (ISI). This paper presents a finite impulse response filter-based feed forward equalizer (FFE) to reduce the effect of ISI on these channels. The efficacy is of the FFE is demonstrated by measuring the eye diagrams of a 10 Gbps signal transmitted through an optical fiber as well as a copper backplane with and without FFE compensation. The proposed FFEs successfully compensate ISI for both the optical and copper backplane links. All circuits are fabricated using a 0.18 mu m CMOS process.
cmos optical fiber feed forward equalizer backplane