Inductively Coupled Board-to-Board Connectors

This paper discusses the potential application of inductive coupling elements as backplane connectors. Tradeoffs in the choice of inductive elements are discussed and a simple circuit model for electrically large board-to-board transformers is presented. Measured data for a 10mm outer diameter transformer shows an acceptable eye opening for 400Mbps NRZ data, and over 1GHz of bandwidth in the frequency domain. We also discuss how inductive connectors could find application in future long range FR4 backplanes