Abstract

Signal integrity (SI) can be interpreted as a measure of the distortion of the incident pulse, which is attributed to various contributors, e.g., inter-symbol interference (ISI), crosstalk, jitter, etc. The channel insertion loss is generally the most critical concern in SI designs, since it determines the working bandwidth of a high-speed channel, and the bandlimited channels are known as the root cause of ISI. At the tens of Gigabit rates in use today, PCB transmission lines may have appreciable losses, which can be divided into frequency-dependent dielectric loss and conductor loss, and noticeable amount of losses can be generated at high-frequencies due to the skin effect and copper rough surfaces. In order to reduce the additional conductor loss due to the surface roughness, the employment of low-profile copper foils is a common practice in high-speed digital design. However, this existing method is not cost-effective. In this paper, insertion loss reduction using rounded corners are proposed and verified using both 2D and 3D full-wave simulations for the first time. Rounded corners can mitigate the increased insertion loss due to copper surface roughness in PCB transmission lines and can be applied in high-speed interconnect designs to increase eye margins. The impact of applying rounded corners on far-end crosstalk is also discussed.

Department(s)

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Comments

National Science Foundation, Grant IIP-1916535

Keywords and Phrases

channel loss; conductor loss; dielectric loss; far-end crosstalk; insertion loss; rounded corner; surface roughness; transmission line

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

978-166541671-9

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Final Version

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2023 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2022

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