An educational tool for crosstalk animations

Crosstalk between coupled transmission lines is a mandatory topic of education in high speed electronic packaging. During our didactic activities at "Politehnica" University of Timisoara, we found out that our students have difficulties of intuitively perceiving the effects of electromagnetic coupling on transmission lines signal propagation, especially when crosstalk coexists with multiple reflections from impedance discontinuities caused by junctions or unmatched terminations. We considered that the main cause of this problem comes from the inability to visualize the propagation and coupling phenomena, which evolves simultaneously in time and space. To cope with this situation, we developed in Matlab a coupled transmission line simulator that produces results in an animated fashion. Based on numerical solving of the coupled transmission lines equations, it is consistent with the physical phenomena and gives the students an intuitively insight of signal propagation in coupled transmission lines.