A new design flow to evaluate high-speed SerDes link performance with re-driver

Due to non-LTI behaviour of re-driver, simulation methodology and model format are still working in progress for continuous improvement on accuracy and efficiency to perform statistical analysis such as BER for high-speed serial IO links. In this paper, a measurement based methodology is proposed and introduced to provide a flow and methodology to evaluate re-driver link performance. The methodology is based on re-driver assessment board to obtain reference channel through measurement by meeting industry IO specifications. Channel Quality Comparison (CQC) is then introduced and used to evaluate risk level of the proposed design topology by benchmarking to the reference channels. Design engineers can use the flow and methodology introduced in this paper to evaluate link performance for their proposed topology in addition to using simulation. A design example on test platform for USB3 is reported to demonstrate the usage with measurement results.