Testing and characterization of high-speed signals using incoherent undersampling driven signal reconstruction algorithms

The objective of the proposed research is to develop a framework for the signal reconstruction algorithm with sub-Nyquist sampling rate and the low-cost hardware design in system level. A further objective of the proposed research is to monitor the device-under-test (DUT) and to adapt its behaviors. The key contribution of this research is that the high-speed signal acquisition is done by direct subsampling. As the signal is directly sampled without any front-end radio-frequency (RF) components such as mixers or filters, the cost of hardware is reduced. Furthermore, the distortion and the nonlinearity from the RF components can be avoided. The first proposed work is wideband signal reconstruction by dual-rate time-interleaved subsampling hardware and Multi-coset signal reconstruction. Using the combination of the dual-rate hardware and the multi-coset algorithm, the number of sampling channel is significantly reduced compared to the conventional multi-coset works. The second proposed work is jitter tracking by accurate period estimation with incoherent subsampling. In this work, the long-term jitter in PRBS is tracked without hardware synchronization and clock-data-recovery (CDR) circuits. The third proposed work is eye-monitoring and time-domain-reflectometry (TDR) by monobit receiver signal reconstruction. Using a monobit receiver based on incoherent subsampling and time-variant threshold signal, high resolution of reconstructed signal in both amplitude and time is achieved. Compared to a multibit-receiver, the scalability of the test-system is significantly increased.Ph.D