Crosstalk mitigation of high-speed interconnects with discontinuities using modal signaling

In high-speed chip-to-chip single-ended signaling links, far-end crosstalk presents one of the dominant noise sources, limiting the link performance. Diagonalizing the channel using modal decomposition has been proposed to mitigate the crosstalk, but so far only the application to uniform low-loss transmission line channels has been investigated. In this paper, application of modal decomposition to a typical memory bus with discontinuities is presented. The properties of the modes are closely studied to construct the optimum terminations. The proposed approach is verified using statistical link simulation.