Bit Error Rate and Signal Integrity of Cat-5 based DVI / HDMI Cables

In a previous paper "Cat 5 Cable Modeling for DVI/HDMI Links", we discussed modeling Cat-5 UTP cables in a verification environment that enabled co-simulation of transceiver circuits as well as link interconnect. ComLSI's 0.18um CMOS implementation of 2.5Gbps per wire-pair video data link employs Cat-5 (Cat-5e) UTP interconnect for wired, remote (25m and longer) video data communication. In this paper, we investigate link bit error rates and the relation to received signal quality over long UTP links, and study simple compensation techniques for the interconnect that enable HDMI transmissions over Cat-5e links.