Mutual Capacitance

Interference between circuits is a common occurrence, which is increasingly problematic with our ever condensing technology operating in a wide range of operating frequencies. This interference, known as crosstalk, can be conducted or radiated, and we refer to the circuits generating and receiving this interference as either the source or receptor.

Modeling and simulation is a complex topic, usually left to experts of the EMC field as the amount of knowledge and understanding that goes into creating a model can be tremendous.

When two circuits are in the vicinity of one another, a signal propagating in one circuit can induce a signal in another circuit, due to capacitive (electric field) and/or inductive (magnetic field) coupling between the circuits. This phenomenon is referred to as crosstalk.

This article discusses the crosstalk reduction between PCB traces by utilizing a guard trace between the traces and investigating the effect of the guard trace grounding.