Parametric Investigation of Near End and Far End Crosstalks and Signal Integrity in Multiconductor Transmission Lines on PCB

Abstract

Multiconductor transmission lines (MTL) carry signals with wide range of frequencies from one point to another. These signals may be corrupted by the unwanted contributions from the neighboring line conductors. Transmission line effects can have a significant effect on the data being sent. As the data speed increases, high frequency effects take over and the signals suffer from problems such as ringing, crosstalk, reflections, and ground bounce that seriously hamper the quality of the received signal. In order to estimate the signal quality, signal integrity analysis is needed. In this paper, an attempt has been made to investigate rigorously the near and far end crosstalks and signal quality in the MTL mounted on the PCB by varying parameters such as physical geometry of the lands, electrical property of the substrate and the nature of excitation signal. It has been observed that the coupling inductances and capacitances vary with the variation of physical geometry and the substrate parameter. A multiconductor transmission line program based on the method of moments (MoM) is used to calculate the line parameters for different geometries. The time domain and frequency domain analyses of near and far end crosstalks and signal contamination is investigated by multiconductor subcircuit model using PSPICE.