Complexity reduction in multilevel speculative DFEs with unconstrained receiver response

Abstract

An approach to timing recovery and adaptation that significantly lowers the complexity multilevel wireline receiver is presented in this article. The approach consists of the utilization of the data slicers intended for speculative level detection to extract a digital representation of the input signal, without any constraints on the inter-symbol interference. This digitized input signal is then used in place of the typical error information for timing recovery and coefficient adaptation. The slicer re-use results in more than 50% complexity (power and area) reduction regardless of the modulation order. MATLAB and schematic simulation results are included to show the efficacy of the proposed error extraction approach.