High-Speed Wireline Links Part I: Modeling

In a wireline link, we wish to model a wide variety of architectures and optimize their parameters such as the FFE and DFE tap coefficients, CTLE frequency response, termination impedances, and possibly MLSE parameters, for a given channel and within a given set of constraints as dictated by the application requirements so as to minimize the link’s bit error rate. The modulation can be any of the PAM signaling schemes such as NRZ or 4-PAM. To this end, we first model a general link architecture in Part I, and then optimize the link parameters in Part II.