Crosstalk Measurement, Extraction and Validation in 10Gbps Serial Systems

The goal of this paper is to describe some of the design choices made in a BladeCenter system design. This paper will focus on the connector modeling that was used to make design trade-offs, unique to a 10 Gbps serial system. Connectors are a significant source of crosstalk noise in a system, which could increase jitter in the resulting eye pattern. Since crosstalk jitter is uncorrelated from the link data pattern, it is hard to remove through equalization techniques. This paper provides a process to extract accurate coupled models from connectors. It also describes how modeling was used to predict crosstalk noise and shows how a small percentage of connector crosstalk can have a significant impact on the over all signal distortion, if the connector pin assignment is done randomly.