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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 patented
techniques to recover lost digital signals on high speed serial
links. This process is known as "Equalization"
Equalizer Principles
Equalization restores high speed serial data signals degraded due
to the non-ideal characteristics of the electrical conductors used
as the transmission line. Skin Effect, capacitance and other cable
non-idealities typically result in a multi-pole low pass frequency
response. The compensation required varies with conductor length
and data rate.
EqcoLogic's technology works using a series of filters and amplifiers,
controlled using continuous time measurement and 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
customer 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 - 4.5 Gbit/s
- Backplane Circuit boards: 1.25 Gbit/s - 6.5 Gbit/s
- Power consumption typically 20-40mW per channel
- single feed voltage (1.2 or 3.3V depending on application)
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