Flexible Printed Circuit Meshed Ground Plane Modeling Methodology

Flexible Printed Circuits (FPC's) are widely used inside electronic devices because they are easy to customize, enable relatively dense interconnect routing, and are the most physically flexible. Physical flexibility can be further enhanced by using a meshed ground/reference plane. Unfortunately, meshed ground planes can induce significant signal integrity problems that can roadblock high-speed channel design if not properly modeled. This introduces unique modeling challenges that commercially available software are ill equipped to solve. This paper presents a new simulation methodology to model FPC meshed ground planes in high-performance compute systems using existing quasi-TEM solvers with excellent measurement correlation.