Eugene Mayevskiy, Application Engineer, Tektronix
Fabrizio Zanella, Support Manager, CST of America

Electromagnetic (EM) simulators have proven to be very helpful in designing the different interconnects. The typical output of such EM simulators is a frequency domain S-parameter file, or Touchstone file. The direct SPICE simulation of these files has some disadvantages such as long simulation time, as well as stability and causality issues. The EM simulation-based topological SPICE models can be generated from time or frequency domain data and then effectively used to predict the overall response of the interconnect. In this paper, we will use a full-wave 3D EM simulator to model a backplane to a daughtercard interconnect link. We will then use a topological modeling methodology to generate SPICE circuit models. Finally, we will compare the overall response with the real-time domain measurements.