On Partial Response Signaling for MIMO Equalization on Multi-Gbit/s Electrical Interconnects

Because of its ability to deal with intersymbol interference (ISI) and crosstalk (XT) over mutually coupled electrical interconnects, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) decision feedback equalization (DFE) has proven to be a promising low-cost solution for achieving multi-Gbit/s wireline communication on- and off-chip. However, not only does the channel become very sensitive to manufacturing tolerances at very high symbol rates, the latency in the feedback loop becomes prohibitively large as well. Whereas the former issue has been addressed by adopting a stochastic MIMO approach where (part of) the equalization filters depend on the channel statistics rather than on the actual channel, we tackle in this paper the latency issue by setting to zero the first N taps of the feedback filters. Moreover, we show that precoded partial response (PR) signaling can improve the performance of the resulting scheme, although the achieved gain is smaller than in the case of single-input single-output (SISO) equalization

Robust spatio-temporal partial-response signaling over a frequency-selective fading MIMO channel with imperfect CSI

Partial-response signaling is known to facilitate the equalizer design because a controlled amount of residual interference is permitted. The design of the target impulse response of the partial-response precoder often assumes perfect channel state information, which is unfortunately not available at the transmitter in most practical applications. Consequently, this contribution focuses instead on the robust and joint design of a spatio-temporal target impulse response and the equalization coefficients for a frequency-selective fading multiple-input multiple-output communication channel based on current and/or previous noisy channel estimates. More precisely, the error in the channel estimates is statistically modeled, and robustness is achieved by minimizing the mean-squared estimation error averaged over the joint distribution of the actual channel and the available channel estimates. Numerical results of the bit error rate confirm that the proposed robust partial-response signaling not only provides a significant performance gain compared to traditional full-response signaling, but also outperforms the naive approach, which ignores channel estimation errors

Optimized precoded spatio-temporal partial-response signaling over frequency-selective MIMO channels

Due to the continuous demand for higher bit rates, the management of the spatio-temporal intersymbol interference in frequency-selective multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels becomes increasingly important. For single-input single-output channels, equalized precoded partial-response signaling is capable of handling a large amount of intersymbol interference, but, to date, no equalization scheme with general partial-response signaling has been presented for the frequency-selective MIMO channel. Not only does this contribution extend partial-response signaling to the MIMO channel by proposing a general spatio-temporal partial-response precoder, but it also develops a minimum mean-squared-error optimization framework in which the equalization coefficients and the spatio-temporal target response are jointly optimized. Three iterative optimization algorithms are discussed, which update (part of) a row of the target impulse response matrix in each iteration. In particular, the third algorithm reformulates this row optimization as a lattice decoding problem. Numerical simulations confirm that the general partial-response signaling clearly outperforms the traditional full-response signaling in terms of the mean squared error and the bit error rate. The third optimization algorithm has a better performance but a higher complexity, compared to the first and the second algorithm