Now, as we leap another order of magnitude in data rate from the 3rd generations of serial technologies like USB3 at 5 Gb/s and PCI Ex Gen 3 at 8 Gb/s to 40 and 100 Gb/s Ethernet (40 GbE and 100 GbE), parallel architectures are coming back. The most ambitious is 100 GbE’s four lanes at 25 Gb/s each.
In this paper we start with a quick, high level view of the emerging multi-Gb/s architectures and then delve into the tricks that make them work and how to analyze them.
High-speed serial systems are analyzed with at least one of three goals: diagnostics, compliance, or functional test. Compliance testing is an exhaustive checklist of performance benchmarks designed to assure the interoperability of components made by different vendors. Diagnostics, or hardware debug, involves providing well-understood conditions so that problems can be traced to their causes. Functional test, usually associated with manufacturing, employs a limited number of fast tests to determine if a product works.
Figure 1 shows the essential components of HSS (High Speed Serial) technology. The transmitter serializes a parallel data stream and transmits it through a channel that typically includes conducting cables and backplanes, and/or optic fibers. The most challenging technology is at the receiver because ones and zeros can’t be distinguished at these data rates with a simple slicer. Eye diagrams of signals at several Gb/s are more often than not closed. Tricks at the transmitter, like preemphasis and de-emphasis, and equalization at the receiver effectively reopen the eye so that symbols can be accurately decoded.
Principal components of a high speed serial system.Information is shared by www.irvs.info
