Tina Tran, Design Manager, Altera Corporation
Gary L. Pratt, P.E., Manager, High-Speed Partnerships, Mentor Graphics Corporation
Kwong-Wen Wei, Design Engineer, Altera Corporation
Mei Luo, Design Engineer, Altera Corporation
Kazi Asaduzzaman, Design Engineer, Altera Corporation
Simardeep Maangat, Design Engineer, Altera Corporation
Toan Nguyen, Design Engineer, Altera Corporation
Sergey Shumarayev, Director of Engineering, Altera Corporation

This paper describes the challenges of optimizing equalization performance for a 6G transceiver design used to satisfy a wide range of customer platform requirements. The transmitter includes a multi-tap FIR filter and a receiver that provides linear equalization circuitry. Both are required to provide programmable link equalization used to improve the signal quality of highly attenuated legacy backplanes. Choosing the correct TX and RX configurations from the millions of choices for modern SerDes interfaces can be difficult and time-consuming. This presentation introduces pre-emphasis and equalization link estimator (PELE), a software design tool that provides the prediction of the PELE settings based on analytical analysis of the S-parameter model of the channel. How this analysis is integrated into a signal integrity (SI) tool to provide a starting point to verify and fine-tune the results will be examined.