A 1-Gb/s joint equalizer and trellis decoder for 1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet

1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet employs eight-state 4-dimensional trellis-coded modulation to achieve robust 1-Gb/s transmission over four pairs of Category-5 copper cabling. This paper compares several postcursor equalization and trellis decoding algorithms with respect to performance, hardware complexity, and critical path. It is shown that parallel decision-feedback decoders (PDFD) offer the best tradeoff. The example of a 14-tap PDFD, however, shows that it is challenging to meet the required throughput of 1 Gb/s using current standard-cell CMOS technology. A modified approach is proposed which uses decision-feedback prefilters followed by a one-tap PDFD. This considerably reduces hardware complexity and improves the throughput while still meeting the bit-error-rate requirement. The critical path is further reduced by employing a look-ahead technique. The proposed joint equalizer and trellis decoder architecture has been implemented in 3.3-V 0.25-μm standard-cell CMOS process. It achieves a throughput of 1 Gb/s with a 125 MHz clock. Compared to a 14-tap PDFD, the design improves both gate count and throughput by a factor of two, while suffering only from a 1.3-dB performance degradation.