Signal Integrity and TDR Analysis of Adjacent Microstrip Lines

Application ID: 34301


A signal integrity (SI) analysis gives an overview of the quality of an electrical signal transmitted through electrical circuits, such as high-speed interconnects, cables, and printed circuit boards. The quality of the received signal can be distorted by noise from outside the circuit, and can be degraded by impedance mismatch, insertion loss, and crosstalk. For this reason, EMC/EMI analyses are run to estimate the susceptibility of a device or a network to an undesired coupling.

In this tutorial model, we examine the crosstalk effect between two adjacent microstrip lines on a microwave substrate with a constant dielectric constant. Two pulses are applied to the device where a parametric sweep switches the frequency of the pulse during the simulation.

The simulation presents the time-domain reflectometry (TDR) response at the coupled ports, which shows increased distortion of the signals at higher frequency or data rates.

This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products: