الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Serial links are becoming more vital in the past decade especially with the emerging
needs of high-performance connectivity with the exponential increase of required
data rates in applications like Automotive, Data centers and cloud computing. The
growing demand for such high data rates in chip-to-chip links combined with bandwidth
limited channels imposes severe equalization requirements on the serial link. Channel
equalization could be realized in both transmitter and receiver in the same time. While
the Feed Forward Equalizer (FFE) is the major contributor to equalization requirements
in the transmitter, the Continuous Time Linear Equalizer (CTLE) and Decision Feedback
Equalizer (DFE) are responsible for realizing the equalization requirements in the
receiver side.
This work discusses the imperfections of channels used in wire link transceivers
ranging from Extra Short Reach (XSR), found in die-to-die wire links, to Long Reach
(LR) ones found in backplanes. Then it shows the impact of such impurities on the
quality of the high-speed transmitted data as a degradation in the quality of received
data in form of a high Bit Error Rate (BER) or a closed eye diagram. The thesis also
provides an overview of serial links with the mostly commonly used signaling techniques,
Non-Return-to-Zero (NRZ) and 4-levels Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM4). Next,
it presents the increase of the versatile equalization possibilities with the shift from
NRZ-based to PAM4-based serial links. Then it emphasizes the channel equalization
challenges for the latter case as it is dominating the most recent serial links targeting
multi-gigabit rates.
The thesis also provides a complete analysis of the different major blocks used in
channel equalization in serial links and the corresponding design metrics. Then it shows
the immense need of having an adaptation algorithm to control the equalizers deployed
in the two ends of a serial link: transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) to provide adaptive
compensation for channel imperfections. A MATLAB model for one of the state-of-theart
serial links is built. This model is used to validate the effectiveness of using such
adaptation algorithms like the most frequently used Least Mean Squares (LMS) algorithm
with the usage of a practical long reach channel model. The thesis proposes the
utilization of one evolution algorithm, particle swarm optimization (PSO), instead of
LMS. A comparison between both is presented showing the different convergence rates
between both.