A Novel Baud-Rate Timing Error Detector Design for Baseband Transmission System Using Tomlinson-Harashima Precoder

Extraction of correct timing error information is very important for high-speed digital transmission systems. In this letter, a novel effective-data-sequence-based timing error detector (EDS-TED) is presented for a baseband transmission system using nonlinear Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP), such as 10GBASE-T. The key idea of our TED is to minimize the mean square error between the received and desired EDS, rather than between the transmitted data signals. This formulation can exploit the autocorrelation between the EDS signals and extract the timing information embedded in the received signal. Moreover, the proposed architecture can lead to a simple and feasible circuit implementation. Simulation results show that a timing loop based on the proposed EDS-TED achieves a superior performance over traditional TED in terms of the peak-to-peak jitter and the TED gain.