Rambus Inc.

Intel Corporation

Reza Navid

Mohammad Hekmat

Masum Hossain

Farshid Aryanfar

Huy M Nguyen

Dinesh D Patil

Kambiz Kaviani

Xudong Shi

Jason Chia-Jen Wei

Frederick Abbott Ware

Scott C Best

Brian S Leibowitz

John Wood Poulton

Amir Amirkhany

Jihong Ren

A driver circuit of a PAM-N transmitting device transmits a PAM-N signal via a communication channel, wherein N is greater than 2, and the PAM-N signal has N signal levels corresponding to N symbols. A PAM-N receiving device receives the PAM-N signal. The PAM-N receiving device generates distortion information indicative of a level of distortion corresponding to inequalities in voltage differences between the N signal levels. The PAM-N receiving device transmits to the PAM-N transmitting device the distortion information indicative of the level of the distortion. The PAM-N transmitting device receives the distortion information. The PAM-N transmitting device adjusts one or more drive strength parameters of the driver circuit of the PAM-N transmitting device based on the distortion information.

Receiver/transmitter co-calibration of voltage levels in pulse amplitude modulation links

A driver circuit of a PAM-N transmitting device transmits a PAM-N signal via a communication channel, wherein N is greater than 2, and the PAM-N signal has N signal levels corresponding to N symbols. A PAM-N receiving device receives the PAM-N signal. The PAM-N receiving device generates distortion information indicative of a level of distortion corresponding to inequalities, in voltage differences between the N signal levels. The PAM-N receiving device transmits to the PAM-N transmitting device the distortion information indicative of the level of the distortion. The PAM-N transmitting device receives the distortion information. The PAM-N transmitting device adjusts one or more drive strength parameters of the driver circuit of the PAM-N transmitting device based on the distortion information.

Receiver circuitries having multiple branches, such as unrolled feedback equalizers and fractional-rate receivers, may present differences between filtering elements of different branches with common filter inputs. Embodiments include devices capable of calibration that compensates such differences. The devices may be capable of introducing front-end offsets to emphasize the mismatches, and sweep filter input values to calculate the mismatches, and introducing offsets in the branches to compensate for the mismatches. Methods for use of the calibration devices are also described.

Calibration for mismatch in receiver circuitry with multiple samplers

A phase-locked loop circuit comprises a multi-phase oscillator having a plurality of coupled oscillators. A calibration module detects mismatches between frequency characteristics of the different oscillators in the phase-locked loop circuit during a calibration process. The calibration module then calibrates the various oscillators to compensate for the detected mismatch. Once calibrated, the phase-locked loop circuit can operate with little or no performance degradation despite the mismatch in frequency characteristics between the different oscillators.

Digital calibration for multiphase oscillators

A receiver frontend having a high-frequency AC-coupled path in parallel to a low-frequency feed-forward path for baseline correction. The low-frequency path blocks the DC common-mode voltage of the input differential signal pair, but passes low-frequency differential signal components (e.g., long strings of a single value, or disparities in the number of 1's and 0's over a long period of time.) The low-frequency path can include a passive network for level shifting and extending the range of acceptable common-mode input voltages. The low-frequency path can also include a differential (e.g., transconductance) amplifier to isolate the common-mode input voltage from the output of the baseline wander correction circuit.

Baseline wander correction

Circuitry capable of performing fractional clock multiplication by using an injection-locked oscillator is described. Some embodiments described herein perform fractional clock multiplication by periodically changing the injection location, from a set of injection locations, where the injection signal is injected and/or by periodically changing a phase, from a set of phases, of the injection signal that is injected into the ILO.

Integrated circuit comprising fractional clock multiplication circuitry

A source-synchronous clocking signal is sampled by an edge sampler triggered by a phase-adjusted version of the clocking signal. The output of the edge sampler is used as a phase-error indicator for a filtered feedback loop that aligns the phase-adjusted clocking signal to minimize, on average, the difference between the received source-synchronous clocking signal and the phase-adjusted version of the clocking signal minus the setup time of the sampler. This forms a delay-locked loop configuration. The phase adjustment information used to produce the aligned phase-adjusted clocking signal is then to produce a receiver clocking signal that is used to sample the source-synchronous data signal.

Source-synchronous receiver using edge-detection clock recovery

A transmit circuit can be configured to output two-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-2) or four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4). In the PAM-2 mode, pre-tap feed-forward equalization (FFE) and post-tap FFE can be applied to the PAM-2 signal by pre-taps and post-taps, respectively. In the PAM-4 mode, at least one post-tap is repurposed to generate, along with the main tap, the main PAM-4 signaling levels. At least one PAM-2 FFE tap is repurposed to apply FFE in the PAM-4 mode.

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San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Reza Navid