This article presents a 2-lane$2 \times 2$multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) minimum mean-squared-error (MMSE)-decision-feedback equalizer (DFE) with far-end crosstalk (FEXT) cancellation for digital-to-analog converter (DAC)-/analog-to-digital converter (ADC)-based high-speed serial links. The receiver (RX) datapath is designed with a 15-tap MIMO feedforward equalizer (FFE) and a one-tap MIMO DFE with the least mean square (LMS), enabling adaptation to channel variation while maintaining the MMSE setting. The RX digital signal processor (DSP) place and route (PnR) in a 28-nm CMOS is estimated to consume 201 mW/lane at a 56-Gb/s/lane data rate while occupying a 0.5-mm2/lane silicon area. We further implement a real-time evaluation platform to verify the functionality of the MIMO PAM-4 MMSE-DFE with rapid bit-error-rate (BER) testing on RFSoC. The measurement result demonstrates that the MIMO MMSE-DFE significantly improves BER performance from 2.75e−3to 1.31e−7compared with equalization without FEXT cancellation when communicating over a channel exhibiting 12.4-dB insertion loss (IL) and 13.2-dB IL-to-crosstalk ratio (ICR) at Nyquist.

This paper presents an area- and energy-efficient 4-lane far-end crosstalk (FEXT) cancellation wireline transceiver (TRX) with a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) discrete multitone (DMT) modulation. The channel estimation (CHEST) is an essential block for DMT TRX to find the MIMO equalizer coefficients at the receiver (RX) side. However, due to the high computational complexity, the matrix inversion in CHEST hinders the generalization to larger MIMO, such as 4×4, considering circuit implementation. In this work, we show that CHEST can be effectively approximated to an element-wise reciprocal instead of an inversion when some properties of the wireline channels are used as constraints. This approximation also simplifies the MIMO equalizer circuit and realizes a decentralized MIMO. Simulation results demonstrated that the FEXT noise from adjacent lanes is sufficiently canceled out even with our approximated CHEST and MIMO equalizer, achieving a symbol error rate (SER) of 2E-4 for communicating over a channel exhibiting insertion loss (IL) of 16 dB and 17 dB of IL-to-crosstalk ratio at Nyquist, while showing SER of 1e-1 when the FEXT is not canceled.

This paper presents a novel digital decision feedback equalizer (DFE) design that can relax the feedback timing constraints for analog-to-digital converter (ADC)-based high-speed wireline receivers. The proposed technique breaks the loop-unrolled DFE (LU-DFE) chain by computing multiple LU-DFE chains in parallel with all possible seed symbols, and selecting the appropriate output by the post-processing selection logic. The proposed loop-break DFE (LB-DFE) is functionally equivalent to the conventional DFE with any other implementation techniques such as LU-DFE, look-ahead DFE (LA-DFE), or direct DFE. With topographical synthesis in 28nm CMOS process, the proposed LB-DFE achieved up to 54% of DFE area saving as compared to LA-DFE with look-ahead factor (LF) of 16 for 112Gb/s PAM-4 with 875MHz DSP clock speed. The implementation feasibility and functionality are verified using ZCU111 RFSoC platform at 6Gb/s (3GS/s ADC conversion rate) with a channel exhibiting 25dB loss at 1.5GHz, demonstrating the same bit error rate (BER) performance between the LB-DFE and the LA-DFE. Equipment-based measurements using arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) and real-time oscilloscope transmitting/receiving 40GBaud PAM-4 (80Gb/s) to/from the differential cables with software 21-tap feed-forward equalizer (FFE) and LB-DFE on PC was also conducted.

This paper presents a parallel implementation technique of digital equalizer for high-speed wireline serial link receiver (RX). In wireline RX, inter-symbol interference (ISI) is mitigated by continuous-time linear equalizer, and the remaining ISI is cancelled out by decision-feedback equalizer (DFE). However, due to the existence of feedback loop in DFE, there is no trivial way to parallelize it, making it difficult to be realized in digital circuits for wireline RX based on analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with ≥ 56 Gb/s data rate. In this work, convolution theorem is applied for achieving parallel digital equalizer implementation. The digital equalizer datapath consists of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) core, inverse-DFT (IDFT) core, complex multipliers between DFT and IDFT cores, and overlap-add circuit. Design considerations for low-area VLSI implementation of such architecture is discussed.