400 Mbit/s Digital Repeater Circuitry Provided by a New Design Method and Beam Lead GHz Transistors

A stable, compact, and high-performance regenerative repeater circuitry, suitable for digital transmission systems up to several hundred Mbit/s, has been provided through utilization of new devices, such as 7 GHz beam lead shielded junction transistors, and through a new computer-aided design method, and has been successfully applied to the 400 Mbit/s experimental coaxial cable PCM system. Major features of this repeater circuitry are: (1) an equalizing amplifier with low noise figure (7.6 dB), small intersymbol interference (12%), and automatic line equalization of 21 dB tracking range at 200 MHz; (2) a regenerative output circuit with bipolar pulses of 2.4 Vop amplitude and 700 ps rise time; and (3) total performance with sufficient noise margin (10 dB for error rate 10^-11over a line of 56 dB loss at 200 MHz), small static pattern jitter (20°pp), smaller size ( mm), and lower power (5.8 W). These have been achieved by use of: (1) new devices such as beam lead transistors with fTof 7 GHz, of 0.2 nH and of 0.4 pF and tantalum thin film hybrid integrated circuits; and (2) a new CAD system including block simulation, network design/ simulation, layout design subsystems which use transmission quality (error rate and jitter) as a design criterion, and which can also be directly connected to the manufacture automation systems, e.g., for mask preparation, and transistor mounting by bonding.