Design-space exploration of backplane receivers with high-speed ADCs and digital equalization

High-speed backplane receivers based on front-end ADCs with digital equalization facilitate design reuse, portability, and flexibility to reconfigure itself and accommodate different channel environments. However, power and complexity of such receivers can be high and require thorough high-level exploration to optimize design tradeoffs. This paper presents a backplane receiver model consisting of a simple, accurate, experimentally-verified, and parameterized high-speed flash ADC and a configurable digital equalizer for design-space exploration. Simulations demonstrate tradeoffs between ADC and equalizer bit resolution while maintaining constant receiver performance.