Far-end crosstalk reduction in adjacent PCB traces employing High/Low-Z configurations

This paper introduces a new High/Low-Z trace configuration to reduce far-end crosstalk in adjacent printed circuit board (PCB) interconnects. The emphasis is made to reduce crosstalk without using additional PCB components in the design. Specifically, we employ stepped impedance elements of uniform length on the victim traces to suppress high-frequency electromagnetic interference. The overall design is much simpler than the usual low-pass filter configurations which are difficult to implement in the prototype testing. The proposed approach shows remarkably better results as compared to conventional intervening guard trace schemes. Further, the proposed configuration can be combined with the conventional schemes to achieve even higher reduction in crosstalk.