The IEEE oversees the development of electrical standards worldwide. One such area is the development of the 10-gigabit backplane interconnect. Recently, the specification has been in terms of an “eye opening,” a measurement representative of loss at the end of a channel.

With signal speeds increasing, the eye opening is more difficult or even impossible for a circuit designer to measure and ensure compliance to the specification. The scope of this paper is to propose a frequency domain based method for channel specification, through the characterization of scattering parameter measurements. The paper introduces a tool for channel analysis and establishes correlation between frequency domain parameters and the time domain eye opening so that eye opening will not have to be measured for compliance.