Statistical Eye Diagram for Nonideal Decision Feedback Equalizer (DFE)

This paper introduces the statistical eye diagram for the nonideal decision feedback equalizer (DFE). The DFE equalizes the inter-symbol-interference (ISI) based on the previous bits the DFE makes decisions. However, a DFE may make a wrong bit decision due to a substantial amount of noise, which is defined as a nonideal DFE in this paper. The statistical eye diagram was proposed for efficient signal integrity (SI) analysis, however, it is not applicable to the nonideal DFE. Because the statistical eye diagram has variables of the sampled voltage and sampling time. The DFE includes variables of a threshold voltage and sampling time for a slicer, which leads to a dependency between the variables and the corresponding statistical eye diagram. Thus, this paper proposes the statistical eye diagram for the nonideal DFE. The proposed method is verified by comparison to the transient simulation.