Laddering wave in serpentine delay line

The backward propagating crosstalk among the sections of a serpentine delay line accumulates to appear as a laddering wave in the receiving waveform. This occurrence results in severe signal distortion and may significantly reduce the desired time delay. A novel wave tracing analysis is proposed to describe qualitatively the waveform of the laddering wave. Furthermore, a quantitative analysis based on the modal decomposition theory is derived to predict the level of each ladder. The theory has been verified from the comparison of the numerical results with those obtained by the detailed SPICE simulation and the TDT measurement