An Electromagnetic Interference Immune PAM-4 Transceiver System

This article presents the design of a pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) transceiver that supports high-speed wireline communication in the presence of electromagnetic interference (EMI). The proposed PAM-4 transceiver uses an input level shifter (ILS) and a modified electrostatic discharge (ESD)-protection circuit to reduce the effects of EMI at the transmitter. In order to overcome the effects of EMI at the receiver, the front end is designed with an enhanced input common-mode range. The transverse electromagnetic (TEM) cell method, as provided in the IEC 62132-2 standard, is followed to experimentally verify the radiated EMI-immunity of the proposed PAM-4 transceiver system over its traditional counterpart. For proof of concept, the proposed EMI-immune PAM-4 transceiver and the traditional PAM-4 transceiver circuits are implemented using the 130-nm BiCMOS process. The proposed transceiver operates at a data rate of 6.5 Gbps while maintaining an eye-opening of 70 mV for each bit in the presence of EMI, meeting the requirement of the IEEE 802.3 bs standard. The proposed PAM-4 transceiver withstands a wide range of EMI frequencies that span from 150 kHz to 2 GHz with an EMI power of 0–20 dBm.