EMC ’ 09 / Kyoto An On-Chip Spectrum Analyzer for Signal Integrity Estimation of High Speed Serial Links

We present an on-chip spectrum analyzer (OSA) to estimate signal integrity of high speed serial links. The proposed OSA is composed of an on-chip sine-wave generator (OSG) and an on-chip amplitude detector (OAD), which are physically implemented in a four-metal, 1.8 V, 0.18 um standard CMOS technology. The implemented OSA is experimentally verified with a characterization of High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) cables, which confirmed that the implemented OSA can successfully provide transfer functions of the channels up-to 1.5 GHz. Finally, this paper also investigates the good potentiality of the proposed OSA for high speed equalizer applications.