Study on the use of different transmission line termination strategies to obtain EMI-diverse redundant systems

In this paper, the application of different termination schemes (source-termination, load-termination, source-and-load-termination) is studied to achieve EMI-diverse behavior in a redundant system comprising three parallel traces. This redundant system is disturbed by strong incident fields under reverberation room conditions. Reverberation room conditions refer to the situation where multiple plane waves are incident onto the system-under-study, each with a random angle-of-incidence, polarization and phase. Two different geometries are compared: a non-redundant system comprising a single trace on a PCB and a redundant system comprising three parallel traces. The different termination schemes are applied on both geometries. A reciprocity-based technique is used to efficiently calculate the induced voltages and the resulting bit error probability in the different geometries. It is shown that, on its own, use of different termination schemes is not able to provide EMI-diverse behavior.