Full-Wave, TwinAx, Differential Cable Modeling
B. Mutnury
D.N. de Araujo, G. Pitner, M. Commens*
Ansoft Corporation
11782 Jollyville Rd Suite 214, Austin, TX 78759
4 Station Square, Suite 200, Pittsburgh, PA 15129*
Email: ddearaujo, gpitner, mcommens @ansoft.com
Abstract
In modern data centers, rack mount equipment provides
ease of planning, installation, and management due to the
standardized form-factors that multiple vendors follow.
Within a single server or a blade environment, the
predominant form factor is the backplane where multiple
cards communicate through connectors. Within a rack, one or
multiple servers may be installed and communication between
racks and within a rack is accomplished through cables. In
order to guarantee system performance, designers need
accurate models of the cable’s electrical behavior. Shielded
TwinAx differential pair based cables are commonly used for
short to medium reach (less than 10-20 meters) in standards
such as SAS, InfiniBand1, SATA, PCI-Express2. In TwinAx
shielded differential pair construction where the shield is
wrapped around the TwinAx pair, it often has a band stop
filter, or ‘suckout’ characteristic that limits its performance.
This paper models and characterizes this effect using a full-
wave Finite Element Method (FEM) solver implemented in
Ansoft HFSS.
In this paper, the wrap effect is captured using full 3D
electromagnetic model for the shielded TwinAx construction.
The physics behind the suckout effect is explained using both
2D and 3D models. Finally, this paper describes the methods
and techniques that can mitigate the suckout effect as well as
a novel cable construction with a helical shield wrap without
any suckout effects.
I. Introduction
As demand for improved performance drives designers to
increase data rates, aggressive time-to-market schedules
places emphasis on achieving system level closure through
efficient modeling and simulation. At the system level,
accurate models to correctly predict the behavior of data
transmission path components become essential.
In modern data centers, rack mount equipment provides
ease of planning, installation, and management due to the
standardized form-factors that multiple vendors follow.
Within a single server or a blade environment, the
predominant form factor is the backplane where multiple
cards communicate through connectors. Within a rack, one or
multiple servers may be installed and communication between
racks and within a rack is accomplished through cables. For
1
InfiniBand is a trademark of the InfiniBand Trade Association.
2
PCI-Express is a trademark of the PCI Special Interest Group
978-1-4244-2231-9/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE
IBM System and Technology Group
11400 Burnet Rd, Austin, TX 78759
email: bmutnury@us.ibm.com
J. Diepenbrock
IBM Integrated Supply Chain,
3039 Cornwallis Rd., Research Triangle Park, NC
Email: jaydiep@us.ibm.com
high performance signaling, electrical and optical transceiver
and cable implementation trade-offs need to be considered.
For cost reasons, many standards have a copper cable
implementation for their differential signaling.
In order to guarantee system performance, designers need
accurate models of the cable’s electrical behavior. Shielded
TwinAx differential pair based cables are commonly used for
short to medium reach (less than 10-20 meters) in standards
such as SAS, InfiniBand, SATA, PCI-Express, Double Speed
Fibre Channel, High Bandwidth LVDS, HIPPI 6400, DVI,
SONET/SDH high speed copper, and 10 Gb Ethernet. One
TwinAx shielded differential pair construction where the
shield is wrapped around the TwinAx pair often has a
bandstop filter, or ‘suckout’ characteristic that limits its
performance. This paper models and characterizes this effect
using a full-wave Finite Element Method (FEM) solver
implemented in Ansoft HFSS.
The most obvious limitation of copper interconnects is
loss [1]. This loss is typically composed of frequency
dependent conducrive and dielectric loss. While skin effect
increases conductive loss proportionally to the square root of
frequency, surface roughness can asymptotically double this
loss at higher frequencies [2]. Additional sources of loss
based on physical geometry can manifest and add to the
overall loss such as differential to common mode conversion
caused by in-pair skew, discontinuities, and radiation. These
effects can have a drastic impact as can be observed in [3]
where low skew 28AWG differential cable insertion loss was
compared to that of a high skew 26AWG differential cable.
While the thinner 28AWG cable has comparable insertion
loss up to 7.5 GHz, it is significantly better at higher
frequencies due to the mode conversion in the high skew
26AWG cable despite having more lossy conductors.
While the strength of modeling techniques that are based
on hardware measurements are that they accurately capture
the electrical properties of a single manufactured sample of
hardware such as [4], they also has a weakness where only
that particular instance of the fabricated hardware’s electrical
properties were captured. In order to accurately account for a
manufacturing tolerances and process variations, multiple
samples representative of the manufacturing process corners
and worst-case scenarios are required to capture the range of
possible components that may be encountered in the design’s
lifetime.
Typical methods of modeling the differential TwinAx
cables use uniform 2D cross-sections using tools such as
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Finite Element Method (FEM) based Ansoft SI2D [5], the
Method-of-Moments (MoM) based IBM CZ2D [6], among
others. These tools can capture the frequency dependent R(f),
L(f), C(f), G(f) parameters on a per-unit-length basis,
however, they assume that the cable 2D cross-section is
uniform along its length.
In the foil wrap construction manufacturing process, the
differential pair shield is wrapped along the TwinAx in a
helical manner. This wrap will cause an effect commonly
known as the ‘suckout’ where significant loss, sometimes
order(s) of magnitude larger than that attributed to the
uniform cross-section cable will occur within the frequency
response of the cable. This stopband within the cable’s
frequency response will significantly limit the typical cable’s
performance beyond the capabilities of most transceiver
equalization schemes of the short to medium reach standards.
In this paper, the reason behind the wrap effect is
explained in section II. Section III shows modeling and
simulation of TwinAx cables using full 3D and 2D
electromagnetic models. Section IV discusses some of the
methods and techniques to mitigate the suckout effect in
TwinAx cables. Section V summarizes the paper.
II. Current Return
In the foil wrap construction manufacturing process, the
differential pair shield is wrapped along the TwinAx in a
helical manner. This wrap will cause an effect commonly
known as the ‘suckout’ where significant loss, sometimes
order(s) of magnitude larger than that attributed to the
uniform cross-section cable will occur within the frequency
response of the cable (Figure 1).
Figure 1 - Suckout effect for a 26AWG TwinAx cable
This stopband within the cable’s frequency response will
significantly limit its typical performance beyond the
capabilities of most transceiver equalization schemes of the
short to medium reach standards.
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Problem: Shield current return
The differential nature of TwinAx cables forces the return
current along opposite sides of the shield. The gap in the
shield creates a current return path discontinuity. The
periodicity of the discontinuity causes the sharp filtering
effect.
Twin Axial cable (TwinAx) contains shielded differential
pair(s) and was originally used by IBM 5250 terminal and
printers up to a distance of 5000 feet [7] at a rate of 1Mbps
from 1978 to 1983. Current configurations of the TwinAx
typically include an additional grounded drain wire or two in
each wire pair. Primary conductors are typically made of
copper, silver plated copper, or in the case of the Eye-Opener
PlusTM3, silver over nickel over steel to achieve self-
equalization [8]. The dielectric is composed of polyethylene
or polyolefin foam or perhaps Teflon insulation with a very
low loss tangent. For this study, we use a 45 mil diameter
insulator with 1.65 dielectric constant and 0.00045 loss
tangent. Signal and drain conductors are made of copper with
16 mils and 12 mils in diameter respectively. The shield is
typically made of a polyester film, metalized on one side for
isolation with 1 mil thick copper assumed. In order to
provide 100% shield coverage in the presence of bending, the
shield is typically wrapped with a certain amount of overlap.
To model the wrap effect of the shield foil, a gap is
introduced to represent the discontinuity of the return path as
shown in Figure 2. Both models only provide DC current in
the helical wrap pattern of the shield.
Overlap
Shield construction
shield
Signal_P
Signal_N
shield
wrap turn n wrap turn n+1
Shield model
shield
Signal_P
Signal_N
shield
Gap
Figure 2 - Shield wrap modeling
III. 2-D and 3-D Modeling and Simulation
Typically in cable modeling, a 2D cross-section of the
cable is used to extract a frequency dependent model of the
transmission line characteristics for simulation. This
approach assumes that the 2D cross-section is uniform along
the direction of propagation. 3D effects such as the helical
wrapping of the shield are not captured and the lack of this
effect may have significant system level impacts.
3
Eye Opener Plus is a trademark of W. L. Gore and Associates.

Figure 3 - 2D Cross section cable modeling
In order to capture the 3D effects of the shield wrap, a 2D
model (as shown in Figure 3) is extended in the 3rd dimension
and a gap in the shield is added to represent the current return
discontinuity as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4 - Extended model with Shield Gap
Parameterization of the model allows for the evaluation
of the effects of the various physical parameters relevant to
the suckout effect as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5 - 3D model example parameters
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Shield modeling
As the number of turns in the model is increased for a
given gap pitch, the suckout effect becomes more pronounced
as seen in Figure 6.
Figure 6 - Insertion loss vs 1,2,4,8,16 turns, 282 mil pitch
While in this case the pitch between the gaps in the shield
along the direction of propagation was 282 mils, lower pitch
will shift the suckout to a higher frequency as can be seen in
Figure 7 where the insertion loss for 3 turns up to 48 turns for
the 35mil gap pitch.
Figure 7 - Insertion Loss vs. turns for 35 mil pitch
IV. Suck-Out Mitigation Approaches
Although the shield has DC continuity along the direction
of propagation, the differential excitation of the signal wires
forces a symmetry of the return current and predominant
propagation as shown in Figure 8
 no current weak current Comparing the suckout for a single drain design in Figure
weak current
6 with the dual drain design with the same gap pitch in Figure
Strong current 11, we see a 5x reduction in the insertion loss in dB.

Strong current

weak current weak current

no current

Figure 8 - TwinAx Current distribution

Given the knowledge of this current distribution, we can
see that the helical wrapping along the direction of
propagation creates a periodic discontinuity on the shield
return that acts as a filter causing the suckout.
The drain wire in the TwinAx construction shown in
Figure 8 does not mitigate the discontinuity due to its position
relative to the signal conductors. A dual drain design 2D
cross section is shown in Figure 9 while the 3D model with
the gap in the shield can be seen in Figure 10.
Figure 11 - Insertion Loss dual drain design
Gap start angle effect
Modeling of long 10m cables explicitly in a 3D field
solver is impractical due to the complexity and resource
requirements. A common method to simplify the process is to
model a section of the cable and cascade the resulting model
sections in a system level simulation. An interesting effect
observed while extracting the performance of the cable in 3D
was that the results varied considerably depending on where
the gap started for a given pitch. As an experiment, for a
single turn/section model, the gap starting position was
changed from 0 to 180 degrees in 5 degree increments and the
resulting insertion loss for the single drain design is shown in
Figure 12 and Figure 13 for the dual drain design.

Figure 9 - Dual Drain design 2D Cross-section

With the presence of 2 drain wires, we can see that the
current return has the continuous length of the drain wire to
flow as opposed to the periodic patch nature of the single
drain design. While some current still does flow on the
shield, the effect is minimized.

Figure 12 - Single drain design gap start rotation

Figure 10 - Dual Drain design 3D view

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 Novel Twist-Synchronous Technique
Dual drain designs have drawbacks such as increased
cost due to the extra drain conductor as well as increased
cable diameter which can impact usability and increased bend
radius for cables with a large number of conductors.
Technology exists for wrapping a shield in a helical
manner at a controlled pitch as used for the TwinAx
construction. Combining this with a synchronous twisting of
the conductors creates a novel cable construction that uses the
existing techniques and mitigates the suckout effect. To
validate this proposal, a 3D model of the Twist-Synchronous
TwinAx cable as shown in was created and studied.

Figure 13 - Dual drain design gap start rotation

This effect is observed due to the limited size of the
model. Making it a larger model with 4 turns reduces this
variation as shown in Figure 14 for a single drain design and
Figure 15 for the dual drain design. Less variability is seen in
the dual drain design due to its superior current return path.

Figure 16 - Twist-Synchronous TwinAx Construction

A closer view of the cable construction can be seen in
Figure 17. The twisting of the model along the propagation
direction creates a very complex curved model that can be
solved and is suitable for the Finite-Element Method
electromagnetic solver HFSS.

Figure 14 - 4 turn single drain design gap rotation

Figure 17 - Twist Synchronous TwinAx view

S-parameters were extracted for the twist-synchronous
case and compared with an equivalent 2D uniform cross-
section cable.

Figure 15 - 4 turn dual drain design gap rotation

1688 2008 Electronic Components and Technology Conference

 V. Summary
In this paper, the shield wrap effect in TwinAx cables is
captured using full 3D electromagnetic modeling using
Ansoft HFSS. The physics behind the suckout effect is
explained using both 2D and 3D models. Finally, this paper
describes the methods and techniques that can mitigate the
suckout effect such as the dual drain cable design as well as
the novel Twist-Synchronous TwinAx construction.
VI. References
1. J. Broomall, H.Van Deusen, “Extending the Useful
Figure 18 - 3D Twist-Synchronous TwinAx cable insertion Range of Copper Interconnects for High Data Rate Signal
loss for 1 (282 mil length) and 2 (564 mil length) turns Transmission”, IEEE Electronic Components Technology
Conference, 1997, pp. 196-203.
epep2007 Differential Insertion Loss dB/m woGap_Slice
2. T. Liang, S. Hall, H. Heck, G. Brist, “A Practical Method
for Modeling PCB Transmission Lines with Conductor
0.000
Curve Info
dB(St(Diff1,Diff2))
30GHz : interp_40GHz_100MHz
dB(St(Diff1,Diff2))
30GHz : interp_40GHz_100MHz
Surface Roughness and Wideband Dielectric Properties“,
-0.020

IEEE MTT-S Internaltional Microwave Symposium

-0.040
Digest, 2006, pp. 1780-1783.
3. J. R. Brommall, C.G. Ericksen, “Meaningful
dB(St(Diff1,Diff2))

-0.060
Measurement of Differential Transmission Line Skew at
10 Gbps and Above”, DesignCon 2007.
-0.080 4. Z. Chen, M. Prasad, D. O’Connor, P. Bond, A.
Muszynski, “Differential twinax cable modeling by
-0.100 measured 4-port S-parameters”, IEEE 14th Topical
Meeting on Electrical Performance of Electronic
-0.120
0 5 10
Freq [GHz]
15 20 25 Packaging, 2005, pp. 87-90.
5. Ansoft SI2D, http://ansoft.com/products/si/q3d_extractor/features.cfm
Figure 19 - Uniform 2D cross-section insertion loss 6. IBM CZ2D, http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/gammazandcz2d
performance for 282 mil and 564 mil sections 7. “TwinAx Cable”, wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinax
8. “Timing is Everything”, http://www.amphenol-
Very similar performance was achieved for the twist
aipc.com/images/eo_exd_overview.pdf
synchronous TwinAx cable compared to the uniform 2D
cross-section in our full-wave electromagnetic extractions.

1689 2008 Electronic Components and Technology Conference