LADDERING WAVE IN SERPENTINE DELAY-LINE

The backward propagating crosstalk among the sections of a serpentine delay line accumulates to appear as a laddering wave in the receiving waveform, This occurrence results in severe signal distortion and may significantly reduce the desired time delay. A novel wave tracing anal ysis is proposed to describe qualitatively the waveform of the ladderi ng wave. Furthermore, a quantitative analysis based on the modal decom position theory is derived to predict the level of each ladder, The th eory has been verified from the comparison of the numerical results wi th those obtained by the detailed SPICE simulation and the TDT measure ment.