The Effect of Equalization on Nonlinearity in Time-Based Decision Feedback Equalizers

This paper does an empirical investigation of the effect of nonlinearity in time-based wireline receivers. The linearity of the voltage-to-time converter (VTC), a necessary component of the time-based receiver is simulated, and its impact on the performance of the receiver is studied. Simulation results in a 28nm CMOS process show the effectiveness of using equalization to suppress the effect of VTC nonlinearity and improve the receiver performance.