Richard Allred, Signal Integrity Engineer, Intel

An obstacle to robust high speed interface design is excessive crosstalk. A method is proposed to identify crosstalk sources within an interconnect to prioritize efforts for link optimization.

If the interconnect simulation model is composed of a series of model segments, (transmission lines, packages, etc), then the crosstalk degradation of each segment is extracted and related to the total crosstalk of the system.

The decomposed crosstalk waveforms are evaluated with Peak Distortion Analysis which reveals that the analysis follows the triangle inequality property. This provides absolute bounds for the crosstalk degradation and also has interesting consequences for physical routing rules.