Linear Equalizer Effect-included Worst Eye Diagram Estimation Method for PCIe 6.0

In this paper, linear equalizer effect-included eye estimation method was proposed for Peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) Gen 6. To reflect the equalizer effect, the overall transfer function was calculated by combining the transfer function of the channel and the equalizer. The worst eye contour was predicted using the pulse amplitude modulation-4 (PAM-4) peak distortion analysis (PDA) method. For the verification, the feed forward equalizer (FFE) and continuous time linear equalizer (CTLE) were used. For channels, 9 channel cases with different loss values were assumed. The proposed method was compared with circuit simulation by eye diagram results and simulation time. The proposed method predicted the worst contours well, including the linear equalizer effect, and significantly reduced the simulation time, down to 93% faster, which is approximately 0.86 seconds.