Stepped guard trace with the fewest shorting-vias to eliminate the ringing noise of coupled microstrip lines

This work presents a simple application for a guard trace that can be used to eliminate ringing noise. In the past, other researchers have proposed solutions using a guard trace with shorting-vias to reduce crosstalk. Since numerous shorting-vias degrade the signal integrity (SI) and reduce the flexibility of the circuit routing, we propose a stepped guard trace to minimize resonances between shorting-vias on the guard trace and to eliminate noise. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method, involving a stepped guard trace, elicits better performance than other methods.