Novel design with minimized far-end crosstalk on single-ended striplines

As technology advances, the demand for slim size and higher performance consumer electronics also increases drastically. Stripline is one of the layout designs that is becoming more and more popular on account of the fact that its homogenous characteristics could effectively decrease the interference from both the environmental and material factors. However, far-end crosstalk (FEXT) still exists due to inhomogeneous dielectric environment in realistic board designs. In this paper, a novel layout design for single-ended stripline that could achieve minimized FEXT is proposed. The design aims at cancelling out the FEXT term by having two opposite polarities applied voltages that have the same magnitude. This method is achieved by placing the victim single-ended stripline in between two pairs of differential striplines. In particular, the closest two traces to the victim single-ended stripline are one of positive trace from one differential pair and one of negative trace from the other differential pair.

I. Introduction

Nowadays, consumer electronics such as computers seek for slim size and lighter weight. The best solution to achieve a smaller form factor is to decrease the layout area and the number of layers in the printed circuit board (PCB). Stripline, in which signal traces are routed in between two reference planes shown in Fig. 1, is the most preferred configuration for routing PCB traces on account of its homogenous dielectric environment which ultimately leads to lower interference from other signals and environmental factors. Fig. 1.

Stripline configuration.