Patent attributes
Multiple-level phase amplitude (M-PAM) clock and data recovery circuitry uses information from multiple phase detectors to generate one or more data sampling clocks that are optimized for each of the data slicers. One possible 4-PAM implementation includes 3 data slicers, 3 edge slicers, 3 phase detectors, and a single VCO. The phase detector outputs are combined (e.g., via weighted voting, weighted average, minimum error, and/or minimum variance) to determine an optimized phase estimate for the clock used to sample the data at all three data slicers. Another 4-PAM implementation similarly includes 3 data slicers, 3 edge slicers, 3 phase detectors, and a single VCO. The mid-amplitude edge slicer and phase detector are used in combination with the VCO to generate a central phase while a multiple-tap delay line provides N phase variants before and after the central phase. Information from the non-mid-amplitude edge slicers and phase detectors is used to choose a phase from among the phase variants that best suits the other data slicers. In yet another implementation, a single edge slicer, single phase detector, and single VCO is used to generate a key clock which is used by the edge slicer to track the symbol timing. A clock generator provides a single optimized clock (that is offset from the key clock) that is used by the data slicers. Bit error rates from the data slicers are used to adjust the offset until the data slicer clock is optimized with respect to all the slicers. Alternatively, multiple clocks are generated via offsets from the key clock, each being optimized to the data slicer group that it drives.
