Crosstalk

Characterizing Crosstalk

Crosstalk is the undesirable transfer of energy between transmission lines.  Dense high-speed signal routing in any complex 3D structure is vulnerable to crosstalk, which can cause the following signal integrity problems:

• Increased noise levels (decreased signal-to-noise ratio)
• Increased jitter on data edges (decreased device margin over specifications)

Crosstalk has historically been very difficult to simulate (due to the computational time required to model EM fields in large models) and challenging to measure (due to the large number of independent aggressors that can degrade a victim channel).  One of the biggest challenges of simulating or measuring crosstalk has been the need for asynchronous aggressor and victim channels.  This requirement can lead to many independently-generated clocks triggering multiple generators.

The Centellax PCB12500 Parallel Channel BERT is the best solution for characterizing crosstalk.  The DelaySweep feature approximates asynchronous clocking on multiple aggressor channels, and the remote heads can be used in a number of different measurement configurations.

The Centellax PCB12500 Parallel Channel Bit Error Rate Tester is the ideal test & measurement equipment solution for CFP, QSFP, CXP, and Active Optical Cables.

Centellax on-demand Crosstalk presentations:

Sep 2010: Characterizing Crosstalk Effects in High-Density, High-Speed Backplanes
Jul 2011: Effective Crosstalk Susceptibility Testing in Multi-Channel Devices