Verification of Radiated Emissions Modeling for SpaceWire/LVDS Links Routed on CFRP Ground

Abstract

In their previous work, the authors proposed a methodology for predicting and modeling electromagnetic emissions in case of shielded coaxial cable with respect to the ground dielectric properties. In that work, a shielded coaxial cable was treated as a travelling wave antenna and the decomposed contribution of each phenomenon was validated through extensive electric field measurements of the cable over various ground planes and heights. In the present paper, the authors attempt to verify the applicability of this methodology in more complex structures; exploring the case of SpaceWire (SpW) cable over a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer ground. This setup is of major interest for space applications, as it becomes the standard harness and grounding design for the majority of space missions. SpW is a space-application focused cable with four shielded twisted pairs employing low-voltage differential sign signaling, a geometry requiring rather cumbersome calculations in order to analytically extract the radiated emissions. The authors showcase that this issue can be bypassed with the proposed methodology, while measurements verify the validity of this claim also for the case of complex structures