Practical Limits of Multi-Tone Signaling Over High-Speed Backplane Electrical Links

Application of Discrete Multi-tone (DMT) signaling to high-speed backplane interconnects requires major modifications to the well-known analysis methods applied to wireline communication systems. Tight power budgets in backplane links impose severe constraints on DMT block size and use of channel shortening filters in the system. Consequently, maximum throughput is achieved in a DMT system that is (residual) interference limited and water-filling is not applicable in its original form. In this paper, the DMT system is cast as a Second Order Conic (SOQ problem with peak transmit power as the constraint and optimum integer bit-loading and power allocation are achieved through a novel incremental integer bit-loading algorithm. The convex framework is subsequently used to find "practical" upper bounds on the performance of multi-tone signaling over highspeed links. The results indicate that DMT has the potential to achieve 15-23 Gbps over typical backplane channels and system requirements in terms of FFT block size and prefix length are obtained.