An ISI-Resilient Data Encoding for Equalizer-Free Wireline Communication—Dicode Encoding and Error Correction for 24.2-dB Loss With 2.56 pJ/bit

This article presents an alternative strategy for communicating on bandwidth-limited wireline channels without using conventional equalizers or filters [feed-forward equalizer (FFE), decision feedback equalization (DFE), and continuous-time linear equalizer (CTLE)]: inter-symbol interference (ISI) resilient Dicode encoding and error correction for low-bandwidth wireline channels. The key observation is that Dicode-encoded data have no consecutive 1s or -1s. With this known information, the error correction logic at the receiver can correct multi-bit errors due to ISI. Implemented in 65-nm CMOS, the proposed digital encoding and decoding approach can achieve bit-error rate (BER) less than 10
^-12
while communicating on a channel with an insertion loss of 24.2 and 21.4 dB with 2.56- and 2.66-pJ/bit efficiency while operating at 13.6 and 16 Gb/s, respectively.