An Efficient Filter-Bank Multi-Carrier System for High-Speed Wireline Applications

Abstract

This paper proposes an efficient multi-carrier system that combines filter-bank multi-carrier signalling, decision-directed channel estimation, and frequency-domain timing recovery to eliminate the overhead associated with cyclic prefix, large side-lobes, and pilot carriers. Furthermore, a technique is proposed to halve the required number of FFTs (IFFTs), reducing their complexity by 29% for a 32-point resolution; a method is proposed to correct tilt and stretch distortion; and a gain controller with adaptive loop coefficients is adopted to achieve the same stability but 65% higher tracking bandwidth regardless of the FFT size. The concept is validated at the system level, where impairments are applied, enabling an in-depth comparison to conventional discrete multi-tone signalling. Assuming a 32-point FFT, a 35dB channel, and an overlap factor of 3, results show 101% improvement in capacity, 100% improvement in power efficiency, and 101% improvement in area efficiency, and all while maintaining comparable latency. This work enables very low-resolution multi-carrier schemes, which were previously impractical due to the significant overhead.