Signaling capacity of FR4 PCB traces for chip-to-chip communication

The signaling capacity of traces on the popular PCB dielectric material FR4 is under-utilized today by at least one order of magnitude through the choice of pre-coding, pulse-shaping, equalization, and receiver architecture. This paper determines the channel capacity of FR4 traces of various length in the presence of noise and crosstalk, and explores capacity limits based on signaling schemes such as 4-level PAM.