Transition-limited pulse-amplitude modulation technique for high-speed wireline communication systems

Abstract

This paper presents a transition-limited pulse-amplitude modulation (TLPAM) signaling method to enable a high data rate and robust wireline communications. TLPAM signaling addresses the impact of high intersymbol interference (ISI) ratios in conventional M-ary PAM signaling methods by limiting the maximum voltage transition level between adjacent symbols. The implementation of a TLPAM signaling encoder is realized by setting back the most significant bits (MSBs) in the queue. The correlation between TLPAM's maximum transition level, effective data rate, and eye width/height is analyzed with various channel loss parameters, followed by characterization and measurement results with a realistic channel setup. The analysis and experimental results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed TLPAM signaling scheme for achieving a high data rate with minimal interference.