High Speed DMT for 224 Gb/s and Faster Wireline Transmission

This paper presents a high data rate wireline Discrete Multitone (DMT) transceiver capable of operating at 252 Gbps and higher for short range chip-to-chip and chip-to-module applications. The use of DMT allows for higher spectral efficiency than PAM SERDES systems, using similar bandwidth as proposed 224 Gb/s PAM-4 systems but achieves higher data rates. Data rates have improved over other published wireline DMT designs with the use of narrow sub-channels with both adaptive bit- and power-loading along with a combined transmit and receive side equalization. Simulation and measured results show that the transmit side pre-compensation has improved the BER by a factor of 104 at 250 Gb/s. The system is measured over a channel with a loss of 18 dB at 50 GHz, showing a data rate of 252 Gb/s with a BER of 10-6, and a data rate of 400 Gb/s with a BER of 10-2.