Michael Steinberger, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, SiSoft
Barry Katz, President and Chief Technology Officer, SiSoft
Walter Katz, Chief Scientist, SiSoft
Todd Westerhoff, Vice President, Marketing, SiSoft

As serial channel data rates continue to increase, crosstalk is becoming a more significant impairment, and accurately accounting for the effects of crosstalk is becoming more important to BER estimation. There are many ways to incorporate crosstalk into a BER estimate. Using an example channel for which crosstalk is a significant impairment, this paper compares results obtained from four estimation procedures: jitter-based analysis, explicit time domain simulation, semi-analytic BER estimation, and statistical analysis. Results include estimated BER, eye diagrams, and bathtub curves. For this example, the more abstract methods yield more consistent results.