Modeling and analysis of a trace referenced to a meshed ground plane

Meshed planes are used in today's flexible PCB designs, and due to their non-homogeneous nature, Modeling of nearby interconnects increases in complexity. In this paper, a method to evaluate the effective characteristic impedance of a trace referenced to a meshed plane is proposed that is simpler and optimization based. The effective impedance and the per-unit-length parameters of the line were associated with the meshed plane periodical patterns as well as trace relative locations. A systematic study was performed to reveal the essential relationship between the meshed plane geometric parameters and the trace characteristics.