A Two-Tone Test Method for Continuous-Time Adaptive Equalizers

This paper describes a novel test method for continuous-time adaptive equalizers. This technique applies a two-sinusoidal-tone signal as stimulus and includes an RMS detector for testing, which incurs no performance degradation and a very small area overhead. To validate the technique, the authors used a recently published adaptive equalizer as the test case and conducted both behavioral and transistor-level simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that the technique is effective in detecting defects in the equalizer, which might not be easily detected by the conventional eye-diagram method