ECE team wins best symposium paper at 2017 IEEE EDAPS

ECE PhD candidate Xu Chen, along with his co-advisors, CSL Professor Jose E Schutt-Aine and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost Andreas C Cangellaris, received the Best Symposium Paper award for their paper "Stochastic LIM for Uncertainty Characterization of Fiber-weave Effect on Coupled Transmission Lines" at the 2017 IEEE Electrical Design of Advanced Packaging and Systems (EDAPS) Symposium which took place in Haining, China, this past December. Both faculty members are affiliated with the Coordinated Science Lab. Cangellaris is also the M. E. Van Valkenburg Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and affiliated with the Beckman Institute.

Fiber-weave effect impacts the transmission of signal waves on printed circuit board transmission lines and is especially pronounced for differential signals due to the difference in the dielectric properties of glass fiber and resin. This difference can lead to a different propagation velocity between two lines in the pair which results in intra-pair skew. It is difficult to model the fiber-weave effect since it is dependent on the relative position of the etched traces in accordance with the glass fiber bundles in the substrate. 

In their award-winning paper, the team presented a method to model coupled transmission line traces with uncertainties due to the fiber-weave effect. They presented a fast and efficient stochastic transient simulator to produce a time-domain waveform of the differential signal. Their simulator uses a finite difference scheme along with the Stochastic Galerkin Method to quantify the results of uncertainties in the circuit with a single simulation of an expanded state-space system.