AN 875: Intel® Stratix® 10 E-Tile PCB Design Guidelines

ID 683262
Date 3/12/2019
Public

2.3.2. PCB Materials and Stackup Design

The proper selection of PCB materials and stackup is an essential key in the design flow. There are four key PCB channel design parameters/elements for E-Tile:
  • Insertion Loss (IL)
    • The higher the channel loss, the more difficult it is for devices to send high-speed data over the channel reliably.
    • Different standards have different recommended channel losses.
  • Return Loss (RL)
    • Return Loss (RL) measures how much energy a given channel reflects back. A channel with a high impedance discontinuity will have a bad RL performance (i.e. it will reflect back a lot of energy).
  • Far-End and Near-End Crosstalk (FEXT and NEXT)
    • Crosstalk can be considered a form of noise from neighboring channels. It reduces the noise margin.
  • Mode Conversion (MC)
    • Mode conversion can reduce the common noise cancellation. Common mode noise can leak into the differential mode and reduce the noise margin.