TECHNOLOGY

EqcoLogic is building its business on innovative research and development started around 2001 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a leading Belgian technology university.

At the heart of the company's products are a series of techniques, or "tricks" as the engineers call them, to recover lost digital signal on high speed serial links. This process is known as "Equalization"

It is in these technologies that we have most experience.

Equalizer Principles

The Equalization technology is designed to overcome the degradation of digital signals due to attenuation over an electrical conductor. The compensation applies to conductor length limitations, data rate restrictions or both.

The technology works using a series of filters and amplifiers, together with feedback loops; the circuit design parameters address the following key objectives:

• Close to best match under all operating conditions
• Amplitude independence
• Bit-pattern independence
• Process parameter tolerance (for chip yield)
• Temperature tolerance (for enhanced lifetime performance)

Process Technology

The EqcoLogic Equalizers are purely analogue devices: this makes them very power efficient and allows them to deliver considerably better recovery performance than products that operate in the digital domain. Unlike most analogue equalizers, however, we build products using standard CMOS mixed mode production processes. This results in considerably lower power consumption than alternative Bi-CMOS technologies and ultimately offers scope to integrate products into other IC's.

Typical Performance

We optimize the Equalization circuit for each major communications standard. However, as an illustration, the EqcoLogic circuits typically provide the following performance features:

• Signal recovery from 25 to 30dB
• Fully adaptive within speed range of product class, for example
  • Firewire: 100 Mbit/s - 400 Mbit/s
  • Uncompressed video: 280 Mbit/s - 1.5 Gbit/s
  • Backplane Circuit boards: 1.25 Gbit/s - 6.5 Gbit/s
• Power consumption typically [20-40mW] per channel; single feed voltage (1.8 or 3.3V depending on application)