Signal integrity improvement in lossy transmission line using segmental transmission line

Waveform distortion in lossy transmission lines is getting serious in long traces in PCBs in GHz domain. So far this signal-integrity (SI) degradation problem has been solved with some active devices, such as equalizer, pre-emphasizer or de-emphasizer. These devices however require unnecessary power-consumption, cost, and packaging area. We have proposed a novel PCB trace structure called “Segmental Transmission Line (STL)” already in order to reduce reflection noises in the bus wires. In this paper, we firstly apply the STL to restore the waveforms distorted in the lossy transmission line without the active devices. We design and fabricate an STL prototype, and demonstrate that the eye-diagram distorted in the lossy transmission line is improved dramatically more than twice in its eye-height in the STL.