PCB Design – Achieving 100 Ohm Impedance for HDMI Differential Pair on FR4

hdmiimpedancepcbpcb-designsignal integrity

I have a 6 layer FR4 PCB, and want to achieve 100ohm impedance on HDMI differential pairs. I am only using top and bottom layer for differential pairs, and following are my parameters:
Trace width= 3.75mils
Trace gap: 12mil
Trace thickness: 1.4mil
Dielectric Constant Er: 3.8-4.2 (taken from PCB manufacturer)
I am not sure what the Dielectric thickness would be. My PCB has a thickness of 62mil, but I am not sure if that is considered dielectric thickness or not.

I have tried different online calculators and none of them are close to 100ohm differential impedance.

I would really appreciate your suggestions!
Thank you

Best Answer

With the track and gap parameters you have, you won't get 100 ohms differential impedance with any standard (if any at all) core / prepreg thicknesses.

You will need to make the gap much less and widen the traces somewhat. I don't use less than 4 thou track widths due to the fact that a minor etching issue can introduce errors that are a large percentage of the track width.

Some numbers that work:

Track width 4 thou, track separation 4 thou, depth to plane 6 thou on 1 oz copper gets you pretty close according to the Saturn PCB toolkit.

These are all pretty standard values for PCB design.

Notes on coupling.

Tightly coupled pairs (within a pair) are quite common and this has the advantage of having a somewhat higher single ended impedance on a per track basis within a differential pair which is often easier to implement. 100 ohm differential pairs that are tightly coupled have a typical single ended impedance of around 65 ohms.

Loosely coupled pairs have a single ended impedance of half the differential impedance.

This coupling is not the same as pair to pair coupling (where a decent gap is required).

There are a lot of values that would work, and a great deal depends on the specifics of the core / prepreg material used by the vendors as the dielectric constants for prepreg (in particular) varies widely by manufacturer. If I ask 3 PCB vendors for suggested geometries I will usually get 3 different answers.