Extreme Data Rates and Equalization

How do you open your stressed eyes?
Can you put 10 Gbps signals on 1 Mbps infrastructure?
How thick is your skin effect?
Are your problems interfering, dispersing or attenuating?
Do you know your taps from your cursors?
What's so great about worst case compliant signals?

The demand for faster, cheaper, and better data delivery challenges an engineer’s creativity. Faster means increasing data rates over several Gb/s; cheaper means that the same old FR-4 circuit boards and backplanes have to be used; and better means that the bit error ratio must be very very small. This course gets to the heart of how extremely high data rate digital signals with wide open eye diagrams are closed beyond recognition in real-life circuits and networks. More importantly, we work through all the tricks that allow receivers to interpret degraded signals with less than one error in every trillion bits.

This Course Will Enable Participants to:
  • Design and implement equalization schemes
  • Explain the pros and cons of linear and nonlinear equalizers (FFEs vs DFEs)
  • Calculate the best equalizer parameters from impulse response and S-parameter measurements
  • Invent new proprietary adaptive techniques for compensation and equalization
  • Describe what a digital waveform experiences as it propagates from a transmitter to a receiver
  • Design, calibrate, perform, and understand the results of stressed eye tolerance tests
  • Analyze closed eyes
  • Know when to de-embed

This and and all other courses are available for On Site Training

WHAT THE COURSE COVERS:
    Part 1 - Intro and Review
  • Problems caused by jitter and noise
  • Random vs deterministic noise
  • Eye diagrams and legacy signal integrity analysis
  • Bit error ratio testing, bathtub plots, and BER-contour
  • Transmitter testing
  • Legacy receiver tolerance testing
  • The causes of eye closure


    • Part 2 - Shedding the digital fantasy and embracing analog reality
  • The digital signal as a waveform
  • Dispersion
  • The skin effect
  • Conductors and dielectric effects
  • Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI)
  • Impulse response
  • Transfer functions
  • S-parameters
  • Cursor description of ISI


    • Part 3 – Equalization
  • Deemphasis: equalization at the transmitter
  • Linear equalization – the Feed Forward Equalizer (FFE)
  • Deriving “taps” from first principles
  • Ideal vs actual FFEs and the Matched Filter Bound (MFB)
  • Problems with the FFE
  • Nonlinear equalization – the Decision Feedback Equalizer (DFE)
  • The ideal decision assumption and error propagation
  • Fundamental constraints on equalization
  • Tap optimization
  • Adaptive equalizers
  • Equalizing EMI and crosstalk
  • Comparison to equalizers in fiber optics: polarization compensators


    • Part 4 – Stressed Eye Receiver Tolerance Testing
  • The “worst case compliant” signal
  • Generating stress
  • Calibration of the stressed eye
  • Stressed eye compliance and diagnostic testing
  • The stressed eye tolerance test


    • Part 5 – Analysis of closed eyes
  • De-embedding
  • StatEye
  • Post-equalizer signal analysis
  • What to expect in future high data rate technologies

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
  • Design Engineers
  • Test Engineers
  • Digital Engineers
  • RF Engineers
  • Senior Level EE
  • Physics Students
  • Math Students

"We Exceed Your Expectations!"

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