Keysight Technologies Introduces Industry's Most Comprehensive Crosstalk Analysis Application for Real-Time Oscilloscopes

02/16/2016

Keysight Technologies, Inc. announced the most comprehensive N8833A and N8833B crosstalk analysis application to assist in the diagnosis of crosstalk. The application not only detects and quantifies the presence of crosstalk, but it can determine which aggressors are primarily responsible. Furthermore, the application can go one step further by actually removing the crosstalk from the victim waveform so engineers can visually compare the original waveform with the clean waveform side-by-side. Engineers can also compare the results from other scope analysis tools, such as real-time eye diagrams or jitter analysis. This gives engineers a direct way of quantifying the amount of improvement they can expect by mitigating the different sources of crosstalk.

The crosstalk analysis application can provide a lot of valuable insight into the design. For instance, it can help engineers determine the margins the design would recover without the crosstalk. It can also help determine if a signal that fails design specification can pass without the crosstalk. This can lead to important design decisions such as whether or not it is worth spending the time and effort to improve the crosstalk effect or where in the design to improve.

The need for increased speeds in data communications systems has led to higher data rates and parallel data lanes, which are necessarily placed closer together. The combination of higher bit rates and tightly-spaced lines leads to an increased amount of crosstalk. As a result, crosstalk is becoming a more important problem to diagnose. Power supplies are also an important component. They can create interference on the data lanes they drive in the form of noise and jitter, and they themselves can be susceptible to data-dependent noise such as simultaneous switching noise, which leads to ground bounce.

"As engineers add more data lanes at higher speeds to their designs in an effort to increase data throughput, crosstalk becomes increasingly more likely," said Dave Cipriani, vice president and general manager of Keysight's Oscilloscope and Protocol Division. Keysight's new crosstalk analysis application gives engineers a better way to debug and analyze crosstalk on their designs. It saves them valuable time when debugging challenging crosstalk issues and assists them in making important design tradeoffs."

The crosstalk analysis application can analyze up to four signals (aggressors or victims) at the same time. No additional simulation inputs or files are required. The application can handle different types of crosstalk including transmission line near-end crosstalk (NEXT) and far-end crosstalk (FEXT) as well as power supply aggressors, including power supply induced jitter (PSIJ), voltage-dependent amplitude noise and simultaneous switching network. The crosstalk-removed waveform can then be used with oscilloscope tools, such as E2688A SDA eye diagram analysis, N5400A EZJIT Plus jitter analysis software, N5465A InfiniiSim de-embedding tool and N5461A serial data equalization software.

More information about Keysight's N8833A and N8833B crosstalk analysis application is available at www.keysight.com/find/N8833A and www.keysight.com/find/N8833B. Product images are available at www.keysight.com/find/crosstalk_images.

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