A 125 MHz analog adaptive equalizer for UTP5 cable

Due to the abundance and low-cost of unshielded twisted pair (UTP5) cables, there is a great deal of interest in transmitting high-speed data over long UTP5 cables. However, there are certain challenges that face circuit and system designers in accomplishing this task. The non-idealities of the cable and the data transmission system tend to limit the performance of the communication system. The frequency dependent attenuation of the cable leads to Inter Symbol Interference (ISI), which makes data recovery more difficult for larger signaling rates and larger cable lengths. A channel equalizer at the receiver end can be used to partially compensate for the frequency dependent attenuation of the cable. In this thesis a general scheme for equalization is proposed. The industry\u27s first 2V channel equalizer for UTP5 cable systems is proposed. This device has been fabricated in a 0.21u CMOS process and tested experimentally. The device has very low power dissipation (\u3c12milliwatt) and requires minimal silicon area (0.14mm*0.14mm). The target application of this equalizer is the 1394 UTP5 standard. With the proposed equalizer in a UTP5 cable equalization structure, the peak-to-peak jitter of the equalized signal obtained experimentally is less than 0.3UI (which includes 1394 driver jitter) for data rates of 125Mbps and lengths of up to 100m. Although the overall approach was to design this system for UTP5 cable equalization the concepts apply to other systems as well