Don, If you do go down the path of simulating the split and looking at what-ifs, there is a parameterized HFSS deck for simulating split planes posted here: http://www.hfss-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=6 If you have any questions about the deck, feel free to contact me directly or post them on the forum link above. Thanks, Jason Miller Scott McMorrow wrote: > Don > > Unfortunately, you have a classical non-localizable split plane problem > that is not possible to understand with intuition alone. By > non-localizable, I mean that the EM fields are not confined to a small > region that can be easily analyzed. Non-localizable problems occur when > there are plane excitations due to vias penetrating planes, or traces > crossing plane splits. At the discontinuities, the signals will inject > a parallel plate mode wave into the split core power plane, which will > cause excitation at the 1st, 3rd and 5th harmonics of the incident bit > pattern. When the pattern spectrum (and it's harmonics) aligns with a > power plane resonance, a standing wave pattern will develop that will > increase the power system noise, along with the signaling noise, jitter > and crosstalk. > > What you will need to look for is the parallel resonant frequency of the > power plane, that is, the resonant frequency of the bypass capacitor > mounting inductance, and the plane capacitance. However, since there is > no ground plane adjacent to the split power plane, the impedance will > most likely be high on the average, and exceedingly high at resonance. > This has the potential of being a very bad thing, and extremely > sensitive to process variations of the PCB and the capacitors being used. > > You have 3 possible courses of action, in order of best to worst. > > 1) Redesign to remove the split. > 2) Simulate it in a planar fullwave solver like Ansoft SIWave. > 3) Build it and measure the signal and power system. A spectrum > analyzer would be very useful to determine where the resonant peaks > occur, and whether they will cause meaningful noise, crosstalk, or jitter. > > > regards, > > Scott > > ------------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from si-list: si-list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field or to administer your membership from a web page, go to: //www.freelists.org/webpage/si-list For help: si-list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'help' in the Subject field List technical documents are available at: http://www.si-list.net List archives are viewable at: //www.freelists.org/archives/si-list or at our remote archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/si-list/messages Old (prior to June 6, 2001) list archives are viewable at: http://www.qsl.net/wb6tpu