A Brief History of Work in Transmission Lines for EMC Applications

A brief chronology of the application of transmission line theory to electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) applications is presented. Transmission line studies in EMC began in the 1950s and 1960s with the frequency-domain analysis of crosstalk in cables. Nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) concerns in the 1970s caused an increasing emphasis on the study of incident field excitation of the lines. The advent of digital technology in the 1980s moved the research emphasis toward the analysis of the transmission lines in the time domain. Early work concentrated on lossless lines whose solutions are very simple. After the 1980s, the impact of high-speed digital technology has driven much of the research toward the study of ways to incorporate line losses (particularly, frequency-dependent losses as with skin effect) into the solutions. In addition, the increasingly complex digital systems have resulted in the study of how to optimize the representation and solution of large interconnected networks of transmission lines. This paper attempts to put the historical evolution of the study of transmission lines in EMC in a chronological perspective.