Transmitter Shaping for Receiver Dynamic Range Reduction in Wireline Channels

An online shaping technique for high performance communication over Gaussian channels with Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) and receiver Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) noise is presented. The technique uses online transmitter precoding over Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM) constellation, designed to shape the symbols distribution so that peak power constraint at the channel output is satisfied. An iterative decoder shares information between a modified M-BCJR module, which computes online the trellis transition probabilities of the shaped distribution, and turbo decoder. The result is a reduction in the required Effective Number Of Bits (ENOB) of the receiver ADC. We show that the transmitter precoding performs channel equalization without using any filter. At the limit of very high Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) a complete channel inversion is possible so that the receiver signal spectrum becomes almost flat. Theoretical bounds are analytically derived which enable to assess the possible gain using the proposed method. For data rates of 200 Gbps and 400 Gbps over printed circuit board, simulations show that the shaping scheme enables reduction in the ENOB requirement as high as 1.43 bit and 1.78 bit, respectively, compared to uniform 4-PAM transmission with turbo equalization at the receiver side.