Pre-emphasis and equalization are used to overcome skin effect and high frequency attenuation due to dielectric loss in the media in order to maintain signal integrity and a clear eye diagram opening. A Pre-emphasis device boosts higher harmonics of the input signal in order to compensate for these losses. They are used on the transmit side of a backplane. An equalizer device acts as a high pass filter and amplifier to the input. The gain of the amplifier compensates for the general amplitude losses and a high pass RC filter compensates for the greater losses at higher frequencies. Basically, the equalizer device rebuilds the signal and re-opens the eye diagram.