On May 10, 2024, the financial sector reported that, according to the announcement of the China National Intellectual Property Administration, Apple applied for a patent named "hybrid serial receiver circuit", with the publication number CN118020272A, and the application date was September 2022.
The patent abstract shows that hybrid receiver circuits included in computer systems can include both analog and ADC based receiver circuits. The front-end circuit generates different balanced signals based on the received signal encoding a serial data stream containing multiple data symbols. Based on the baud rate of the serial data stream, the digital receiving circuit or analog receiving circuit is activated to provide the desired performance and power consumption within the possible baud rate range. The ADC based receiver circuit may include multiple analog-to-digital converter circuits with different resolutions that can be selected for different baud rates.