A low-cost equalizer-based auto-gain-control scheme for high-speed transceiver applications

Traditional approaches of auto-gain control (AGC) need to collect long period of data and estimate the average power. It results in the large hardware complexity. Moreover, the accuracy of traditional approaches will be seriously degraded by noise and inter-symbol interference (ISI). In this paper, we propose an equalizer-based auto-gain control (EQ-AGC), which employs very small hardware and does not use extra memory devices. Furthermore, the AGC can find out the accuracy gain under large ISI environment. Our EQ-AGC is already silicon-proven for the application of fast Ethernet transceiver using Faraday/UMC 0.18μm cell libraries.