Applied Micro Circuits Corporation

Kathryn Howlett

Petre Popescu

Quoc Hai Tran

Douglas Stuart McPherson

Diana Gradinaru

Stefan Szilagyi

The invention describes a number of differential, balanced high-speed circuits that permit the design of a receiver with Electronic Dispersion Compensation (EDC) on a single semiconductor substrate, including the functions of an analog Fast Forward Equalizer (FFE), a Clock and Data Recovery, a Decision Feedback Equalizer (DFE), enhanced by additional circuits that permit control of the slicing level to compensate for pulse distortion, and control of the phase offset to set the optimal eye sampling time when a distorted signal is received. To provide the utmost speed of operation, all circuits including the phase locked loop, operate as differential circuits which include a number of improvements in the design of the charge pump, the decision feedback equalizer, the slicing level control, and others.

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Ottawa, Canada

Kathryn Howlett