A two-tone test method for continuous-time adaptive equalizers

This paper describes a novel test method for continuous-time adaptive equalizers. This technique applies a two-sinusoidal-tone signal as stimulus and includes an RMS detector for testing, which incurs no performance degradation and a very small area overhead. To validate the technique, we used a recently published adaptive equalizer as our test case and conducted both behavioral and transistor-level simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that the technique is effective in detecting defects in the equalizer, which might not be easily detected by the conventional eye-diagram method.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DATE
• Authors: Dongwoo Hong, Shadi Saberi, Kwang-Ting Cheng, C. Patrick Yue
• Keywords: Adaptive Equalizer, Continuous-time Adaptive Equalizers, DATE 2007, Hardware, Small Area Overhead