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Pmc-sierra, Inc.

William D Warner

Ognjen B Katic

A method for evaluating operation of a receiver comprising an analog front end, a plurality of samplers connected in parallel to the analog front end, the plurality of samplers comprising a plurality of utility samplers, a plurality of data samplers and a plurality of timing samplers, an unrolled decision feedback equalizer (UDFE) connected to outputs of the plurality of data samplers, and a serial input parallel out (SIPO) block connected to an output of the UDFE and outputs of the plurality of utility and timing samplers. The method comprises adjusting settings of the plurality of utility samplers to sweep across a range of interest, at each of a plurality of points comparing a selected output of one of the plurality of utility samplers at that point to an output of one of the plurality of data samplers to detect an error event, and, accumulating the error events.

On-chip bathtub BER measurement for high-speed serdes diagnostics

Apparatus and methods detect the presence of an isolated pulse in a communications signal, such as a data signal carrying data for a serializer/deserializer (SerDes). An example of an isolated pulse is a '1' pulse preceded and followed by '0' pulses, or a &#x201c;0&#x201d; pulse preceded and followed by a &#x201c;1&#x201d; pulse. These isolated pulses can exhibit a narrow pulse width, and under severe jitter conditions, may not align with a baud sample point, which can cause the isolated pulse to be missed, resulting in a data decoding error. By detecting the presence of these isolated pulses and determining the most likely baud period to which they belong, jitter tolerance can be improved for many channel conditions. This can improve jitter tolerance of a SerDes receiver for links that suffer from various sources of Deterministic Jitter (DJ) such as Duty Cycle Distortion (DCD) and Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI).

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Maple Ridge, CA, United States of America

William D Warner