This paper presents a SystemVerilog-based modeling and simulation methodology for a 4-level pulse-amplitude-modulation (PAM-4) transceiver. The framework is developed to address verification challenges in complex analog-to-digital converter (ADC)-based mixed-signal systems, where conventional circuit-level simulations suffer from prohibitively long execution time. Two key modeling techniques to significantly improve simulation efficiency are introduced in this work. For the time-interleaved ADC (TI-ADC), a counter-based equivalent circuit model is employed to capture dominant rank-1 mismatch errors while substantially reducing modeling complexity. In addition, for digital clock and data recovery (CDR), a statistical bit-error-rate (BER) evaluation approach based on XMODEL primitives is adopted as an alternative to conventional time-domain analog-mixed-signal (AMS) simulations. This modeling framework enables accurate verification of critical transceiver performance metrics, such as jitter tolerance (JTOL), within a 30-minute simulation window. Compared to conventional timedomain simulations, which require more than 12 hours to perform, the proposed approach achieves approximately a 24× improvement in simulation speed.

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 work presents a multi-lane transceiver (TRX) architecture with discrete multitone (DMT) modulation for pin-efficient high-bandwidth chip-to-chip wireline communication. The proposed signaling uses 4 wires to transmit 3 lanes of DMT-modulated symbols in parallel including one lane for signal encoding and decoding for the correlated noise cancellation. Compared to the pin-efficiency of 0.5 in differential signaling, the proposed signaling offers a pin-efficiency of 0.75 allowing each TRX lane to operate at a lower speed given a fixed data throughput or to increase the per-pin data rate with the same or even lower per-lane data rate to differential signaling. While each single-ended lane includes random noise, the receiver (RX) can effectively eliminate most of the correlated noise with simple arithmetic in the digital domain. Higher pin efficiency can be achieved with more single-ended data lanes per redundancy lane depending on the link specifications such as raw bit-error-rate (BER), and voltage-domain dynamic range of the transmitter’s driver and the receiver. Simulation results show that 28.5% of throughput gain can be achieved with 3-lane 4-wire configuration given the same channel, analog front-end circuits, and noise condition to multi-lane differential DMT TRXs.

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.