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 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)