Modeling and Analysis of Nonlinear High-Speed Links

With the data rate of high-speed links increasing, the impact of nonlinear factors becomes more and more prominent, which bring great signal integrity challenges to the analysis and design of high-speed links. However, there are two gaps in the study of the nonlinear behaviors of the high-speed links. One is that there is no simulation platform which can flexibly deal with different kinds of nonlinear behaviors. The other is that there is no metric which can quantify the level of the nonlinearity of the links. Aiming at these two problems, this paper first models a nonlinear high-speed link based on Simulink, which can flexibly adjust the nonlinear behaviors and analyze the impact of nonlinear behaviors on the performance of the high–speed links. Then a metric is presented base on the principal component analysis (PCA) to quantify the level of the nonlinearity of the high-speed links. Simulation results show that the metric can effectively capture the nonlinear severity of the links.