Crosstalk calculators - Which do you recommend?

[Tom Yunghans]

Hi Robert,

I just watched two videos that you did with Eric Bogatin on crosstalk earlier this year. I found them to be very interesting and informative in providing a high-level understanding on crosstalk.

It seems that it is very important for a PCB designer to have a tool to estimate crosstalk for various stackups and signal topologies. Eric made extensive use of Mentor's Hyperlynx field solver from Mentor. In one of your videos with Rick Hartley, he recommended a tool from Polar. I believe both of these tools can be quite expensive and may not be compatible with my budget as an independent contractor. I have seen you use the free Saturn tool in some of your other videos. My understanding is that the Saturn tool is not a field solver and the results may not be very accurate. After these discussions with Eric and Rick, do you still feel that a PCB designer can use that free Saturn tool to design boards or do you have some other recommendation?

Another related question: Since Altium Designer claims to have a field solver built into their layer stack manager, I wonder why they are not providing crosstalk analysis as one of their features. Have you ever discussed that with someone from Altium?

[robertferanec]

- Saturn crosstalk is not perfect, but good enough to re-calculate numbers based on the datasheet / reference design / design guide into specific stackup. It means, you can put there som numbers from an existing design, get for example the crosstalk coefficient and then try to get the same or better crosstalk coefficient in your design.
- I have not done any simulations in Altium Designer recently and I have not used the field solver, so I am not sure.