Multi-tone signaling for high-speed backplane electrical links

Abstract

A multi-tone architecture is proposed for high-speed backplane serial links. To limit complexity, the links use analog multi-tone rather than the more modern DMT. The tradeoffs involved in the design of such a system are examined and the performance of a serial link based on this approach is compared to a baseband architecture in terms of data rate and complexity using a convex optimization framework. Slightly less than 2/spl times/ improvement in data rate at reasonable complexity is shown to be achievable with the proposed architecture.