Backplane Designer's Guide: Design Considerations

This section focuses on designing high-performance parallel backplanes, a task that can be extremely complex. To assure high performance and good signal integrity, many issues must be considered during the design process. To a large extent, system requirements will define backplane design, determining if distributed capacitance effects will be present on the backplane. Due to the frequencies of high-performance backplanes, transmission line behavior is common in most applications. For backplane design, the minimum system requirements are backplane frequency, the number of loads, and, assuming a multidrop/multipoint configuration, the number of outputs switching.