Determining Minimum Printed Circuit Board Trace Dimensions for Transient Suppression Circuits

When designing transient suppression circuits housed on interface assemblies to protect internal circuits from power surges, there exists a need to accurately determine the minimum printed circuit board (PCB) trace width required to tolerate given transients without fusing due to overheating. This paper presents four different PCB trace models that may be used for this purpose. The predicted trace widths are compared with each other for validation by comparison. In addition, selected results are tested to further validate the accuracy of the models.