Design and Latency Analyses of an Enhanced Mixed-Signal Coupling Network With Adaptive Noise Cancellation for Power Over Data Lines

Automotive Ethernet is considered to be the backbone of future in-vehicle data communication. The IEEE 802.3bu standard specifies the use of one unshielded twisted pair of copper cables to simultaneously carry data and energy via Power over Data Lines (PoDL). One main challenge in combined data and energy transfer is the distortion of the data channel due to wideband interference from power signals present in the Automotive environment. This paper proposes the design of a novel enhanced coupling network for PoDL that features a noise cancelling current source controlled by an adaptive finite impulse response (FIR) filter for the active attenuation of interfering power signals. The concept of active attenuation was proven for a resistive network, an average attenuation of 92 dB was measured up to 120 MHz. Further analyses show that the cancellation performance heavily relies on low latency of the active filter. It is derived that the provided attenuation decreases exponentially with the frequency for a given time delay and a novel latency management concept called compressed summation is proposed. The approach maximizes the cancellation performance of the proposed filter architecture by exploiting the knowledge of the ideal filter function and effective latency to define the FIR-filter weights.