Twisted pair cables are used in situations that require strict noise reduction like with signal lines and speaker cables because they are not affected by external noise and do not emit much noise of their own. The cable's performance relies on its electric properties, but these change depending on the state of the current that is flowing. For example, when the current frequency rises, the current is offset in the copper wires because of the skin effect and proximity effect. As a result, the apparent cross-sectional area of the current flow is reduced, causing the alternating current resistance to increase and the inductance to change. An increase in the resistance leads to an increase in losses, and changes in inductance result in distortions in the signal. This is why these frequency characteristics need to be understood in advance.
The above phenomena occur in the interior of the copper wires, so an evaluation using a magnetic field analysis based on the finite element method (FEM) is useful because they can be difficult to predict with manual calculations.
This Application Note explains how to obtain the frequency characteristics of the resistance and inductance in twisted pair cables.
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