An educational tool for transmission lines animations

Abstract

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