A Cable Harness Routing Method Based on the Expected Maximum Crosstalk

With the increasing number of interconnected cables in electronic systems, the crosstalk between interconnected cables has played an important role in the intrasystem interference performance. However, the traditional routing method based on the shortest path cannot solve the problem of cable crosstalk. In this article, a novel cable harness routing method based on the expected maximum crosstalk is proposed. First, the closed-form expression for crosstalk based on the electrically small assumption is derived from the multiconductor transmission line (MTL) equation. According to this expression, the concept of maximum overlap length corresponding to the desired maximum crosstalk is developed. In addition, a conservative strategy is proposed to deal with higher frequency cable routing. The proposed routing method consists of the escape graph and the routing algorithm based on the maximum overlap length. A Dijkstra’s algorithm variant with the maximum overlap length as the constraint condition is proposed. The proposed method is applied to two single-ended and differential signals cable harness routing cases and compared with the traditional method to show that the routing results of the proposed method would keep the crosstalk between cable harness branches below the expected maximum crosstalk.