Performance analysis of pre-equalized multilevel partial response schemes

In order to achieve high speed on electrical interconnects, channel attenuation at high frequencies must be dealt with by proper transceiver design. In this paper we investigate finite-complexity MMSE pre-equalization under an average transmit power constraint, to compensate for channel distortion in the case of both full-response and precoded partial response signaling with L-PAM mapping, and consider the resulting error performance for symbol-by-symbol detection and sequence detection. For a representative electrical interconnect, we point out that the constellation size (2-PAM or 4-PAM), the type of signaling (full response or partial response), the detection method (symbol-by-symbol detection or sequence detection) and the number of pre-equalizer taps should be carefully selected in order to achieve satisfactory error performance at high data rates. For several scenarios, precoded duobinary 4-PAM is found to yield the best error performance for given average transmit power.