A programmable pre-cursor ISI equalization circuit for high-speed serial link over highly lossy backplane channel

This paper presents a programmable pre-cursor ISI equalization circuit for high-speed serial data transmission over highly lossy electrical backplane channels. Although decision-feedback-equalizer (DFE) provides an effective way to compensate various channel impairments, such as frequency dependent loss, dispersion and reflections in the legacy backplane environment, for high-speed, highly lossy band-limited channel, the pre-cursor inter-symbol interference (ISI) is still a significant problem for channel equalization. A programmable pre-cursor ISI equalizer combined with a 3-tap DFE is implemented to work at 10-Gb/s and compensate the channel loss of -20 dB. The results show it outperform a traditional 5-tap DFE.