Texas Instruments Corporation

Amir Peleg

Naftali Sommer

Itay Lusky

Daniel Wajcer

Ariel Yagil

Liran Brecher

Mor Miller

Nohik Semel

A novel apparatus for and method of estimating the cable length of an active network link. The cable diagnostics mechanism of the invention is particularly suited for use in estimating the length of Ethernet network between two edges when the link is active, i.e. data is being transmitted in both directions simultaneously and the transmission of test pulses is not possible. The cable length estimation mechanism of the present invention is based on a well-known property of the spectrum of the insertion loss of the cable, namely, the linear relationship between the attenuation of the cable at a given frequency in decibels and the cable length. Information characterizing this relationship is extracted and used to determine the length of the cable.

Active link cable diagnostics

A novel and useful baseline wander correction mechanism for use with transformer coupled baseband communication receivers. Parametric estimation of the transformer model is used estimate and cancel the baseline wander effect. A parametric model is used to model the baseline wander impairment created by the transmitter and receiver transformers as a high pass filter having an exponential decay parameter alpha. A correction signal for both the far end and echo signal paths are calculated and summed to generate a total correction signal. The total correction signal is partitioned into an analog correction signal that is applied to the analog portion of the communications receiver and into a digital correction signal that is similarly applied to the analog portion of the communications receiver.

Baseline wander correction for communication receivers

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Hod Hasharon, Israel

Amir Peleg