Acceptable Crosstalk

High-Speed Digital Design Online Newsletter: Vol. 5 Issue 11

This week something peculiar happened at my house. It started innocently enough with the
purchase of a clean, dressed, frozen turkey at our local butcher shop. The turkey came pre-
packaged in an attractively decorated plastic bag, which we placed in the refrigerator out in the
garage of the house we have rented here in Oxford.

Two days later I retrieved the turkey, roasted it brilliantly for four hours at low heat on our Weber,
and enjoyed the taste of the beautifully smoked, barbequed bird.

What I didn't notice at the time was that the turkey was noticeably lighter upon removal from the
refrigerator than it had been going in. The difference in weight was accounted for by
approximately one cup of reddish fluid that had leaked out of the turkey when it thawed, escaped
the plastic bag, run down to the bottom of the refrigerator, and from there flowed out the drain
hole in the bottom of the icebox.

The drain is normally designed to catch the few drops of condensation periodically expelled from
the unit during its frost-free heating cycle. The drain discharges into a plastic pan mounted on top
of the compressor motor at the bottom of the unit. The heat of the motor is supposed to quickly
evaporate the water.

In my case, with a pan full of turkey blood sitting on top of the motor, the heat merely incubated
the bacteria in the fluid creating an unbelievable stench in the garage. You would have thought we
had a dead moose lying in the corner. Our neighbors, stoically British, refused to complain, but you
could see their upper lips quivering.

I learned from this experience that a seemingly innocuous source, coupled through unusual
channels into a sensitive area, sometimes causes a big stink. This reminds me of some crosstalk
problems I've encountered, which is the subject of the technical message below.

Acceptable Crosstalk
M. Manivassakam writes:

I have a cross talk problem in my board. My board is a 12 layer board with 4 BGA Devices (1000
Pins) . Four Layers are used for signal routing. I've followed orthogonal routing in the layer
stackup. In two routing layers in some sections of the BGA I am not able to maintain orthogonal
routing. This has resulted in traces running in parallel in these two layers.

I have performed a crosstalk analysis of this board. My tool says that the crosstalk is on the order
of 500mv. The BGA Devices have I/Os that operate at 3.3v, 1.8v and 1.5v.

Is this level of crosstalk acceptable?

What is the... limit of crosstalk that can be ignored?

Dr. Johnson replies:

Thanks for your interest in High-Speed Digital Design.

The limit of acceptable crosstalk depends on your application.

In a synchronous system the crosstalk must be specified during the setup and hold window at the
receiver. During this interval the crosstalk must never drive any valid signal across the receive
threshold to the opposite logic state.

A mathematically sufficient condition for ensuring that crosstalk never causes errors is to limit the
crosstalk to an amplitude X equal to the smallest difference between (a) the intentional signal
observed at the receiver, and (b) the receiver threshold, measured over the setup and hold
window. As long as |X| remains less than |(a)-(b)|, then X+(a) can never cross (b).

The datasheet numbers V(IH) and V(IL), defined at the entrance to the receiver package, are
usually accepted as safe values for (b) when switching in the high or low direction, respectively.

The value of the intentional signal (a) defined at the entrance to the receiver package is best
determined by simulation. The simulation must be run several times assuming both wimpy and
strong drivers, and also assuming all worst-case corner conditions for the line impedance,
termination resistances, and clock skew. When switching high, compute the smallest observed
value of Xhigh over the complete setup and hold window, where

Xhigh =: |(a)-V(IH)|

When switching low, compute the value of:

Xlow=|(a)-V(IL)|

Negative crosstalk happening while switching high must be no larger in magnitude than Xhigh (i.e.,
no more negative than -Xhigh), and positive crosstalk happening while switching low must be no
larger than +Xlow.

Generally, to simplify the noise budgeting process, one just picks one value of X defined as the
smaller of Xhigh or Xlow, and then works to ensure that the magnitude of the crosstalk at any time
(switching high or low) never exceeds X. In logic families with asymmetrical switching thresholds
this simplification sometimes penalizes your noise budget with an overly-stringent crosstalk
requirement. (For example, while switching high a positive pulse of crosstalk wouldn't hurt, but
would still be prohibited under this simplification).

Keep in mind that the above-listed requirements apply for synchronous logic only during the setup
and hold window at the receiver. At other times arbitrarily large crosstalk pulses are permitted
provided that they don't damage your logic or cause latchup.

When the aggressor and victim nets are asynchronous with respect to each other there is no safe
region outside the setup-and-hold window where large pulses of crosstalk can be permitted. In this
case you must limit the peak crosstalk at all times to a value less than X. This requirement applies
to all asynchronous signals like clocks, read strobes, and write strobes.

A synchronous bus wired so that all the lines proceed in the same direction benefits from an
extraordinary immunity to crosstalk. In this case any crosstalk that occurs between the lines of the
bus tends to happen only when the bus is being switched. Provided that the receiver waits
sufficiently long for the crosstalk to settle before sampling the bus, the crosstalk has no effect on
the accuracy of the received signal. (Of course, in some cases one cannot afford to wait so long.)

DC specifications for the minimum size of the received signal used to be given by the static
datasheet parameters V(OH) and V(OL), but these parameters by themselves are no longer
sufficient to determine the received signal level, especially in CMOS architectures where the
receivers draw very little DC current and where the received signal may be clocked long before the
line stabilizes to a final static condition.
Keep in mind that the total noise budget on each victim trace must accommodate the trace-to-
trace crosstalk from each of several nearest neighbors, all of which must sum to a magnitude less
than X.

I'm not going to say Mani's circuit stinks, but my guess is that he has way too much crosstalk.

Best Regards,
Dr. Howard Johnson

2002 Signal Consulting, Inc. and Dr. Howard Johnson. All rights reserved.
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