Harmonic Distortion and Board Layout

Steven O. Smith

How can a printed circuit board introduce nonlinearities in your signal? The board
material is electrically linear (constant impedance) for all practical purposes. The
problem is that the board layout is spatially non-linear with respect to where
currents flow.

Consider the load current. The amplifier draws current from one supply or the
other (depending on the instantaneous polarity of signal applied to the load). The
current flow starts at the supply and bypass capacitor and goes through the
amplifier to the load. The current then returns from the load ground connection
(or the board output connector shield) back through the ground plane to the
bypass capacitor and then to the supply originating the current.

A much over-used phrase is “current follows the path of least resistance”. The
problem with this phrase is that it just isn’t true. Current follows the paths of all
resistances, in proportion to their conductance. There is often more than one low
impedance path where most of the ground current flows in the ground plane, one
that goes direct to the bypass capacitor and one that goes past and perturbs the
input resistors before reaching the bypass capacitor. Figure 1 illustrates the
ground return current flow for a common layout.
The last step, the ground return current, is where the problem occurs. The board
layout is spatially non-linear because the bypass capacitors are in different
locations on the board. The ground currents flow to their respective bypass
capacitors by means of different paths. If a significant fraction of one polarity of
ground current flows past the input resistor ground (perturbing the voltage just for
that polarity of the signal) and the other polarity of ground current doesn’t do this,
then the input signal voltage is modified in a non-linear fashion, modified for one
polarity and not modified for the other, causing distortion. The distortion created
shows up as second harmonic distortion in the output signal.

Figure 2 shows this distortion in an exaggerated form. When only one polarity of
the sin wave is perturbed, the result is no longer a sin wave. How significant is
this effect? Simulating an ideal amplifier with a 100 Ohm load and load current
coupling to the input ground voltage of one Ohm (only on one polarity of the
signal) gives the results in Figure 3. The Fourier transform shows that the
distortion is almost entirely second harmonic at -68 dBc. This amount of coupling
is pretty easy to come by at high frequency on a pc board. It doesn’t take much
to ruin excellent distortion performance.
When single opamps have distortion induced by ground current paths, you can
usually rearrange the bypassing to adjust the ground current flow and keep it
away from the input components. This can be as simple as rotating a bypass
capacitor to move its ground connection away from the inputs, instead of leaving
it next to the inputs. This kind of layout change is illustrated in Figure 4.
Multi-amplifier Chips

Multi-amplifier chips (duals, triples, quads) present a much more difficult problem.
It is not feasible to keep the ground connections of the bypass capacitors away
from all of the input components—especially on a quad amplifier. In a quad there
are input components on all sides of the part, leaving no place to put the
bypassing that avoids perturbing the input channels.

The easy appoach to quad layout is shown in Figure 5. Most components come
straight out from the pins to which they are connected. Depending on which
channel you consider, ground currents from one of the supplies can perturb the
input ground voltage and ground currents from the other supply don’t, resulting in
distortion. For instance, channel 1 in a quad has the bypass capacitor for +Vs
right next to the inputs, but the capacitor for –Vs is on the opposite side of the
package. +Vs ground currents will perturb channel 1 but –Vs currents probably
won’t.

The way to get around this problem is to let the ground currents perturb the
inputs, but make the board current flow spatially linear. Put the bypass capacitors
on the board in such an arrangement that both +Vs and –Vs ground currents flow
through the same paths. If the input signal is perturbed equally by both + and –
currents, no distortion will result. The way to do this is to put both bypass
capacitors next to each other so that they share a common ground point. Since
both polarities of ground current start at the same point (the output connector
shield or load ground) and both are returning to the same point (the common
ground connection of the bypass capacitors), both + and - currents will follow the
same path. If one channel’s input resistor is perturbed by +Vs currents, it will be
perturbed equally by -Vs currents. This is not distortion since the same
perturbation happens regardless of polarity. This is essentially a tiny change in
gain for the channel. This is illustrated in Figure 6.

Two different board layouts were used to test this idea, the Easy layout in Figure
5 and the Low Distortion layout in Figure 6. The distortion results are given in
Table 1 below using the FHP3450 quad operational amplifier. This amplifier
typically has 210MHz bandwidth and 1100 V/μs slew rate with only 100 nA input
bias current and 3.6 mA supply current per channel. As can be seen in the table,
the distortion improvements are largest on the channels that were the worst
(those with the worst load current coupling). The worst channels are improved
the most, which makes all four channels have much closer to identical
performance.
Table 1, FHP3450 Distortion Performance in Easy and Low Distortion Boards
5MHz, 2Vpp out Easy Second Easy Third Low Distortion Low Distortion
Rload 150 Ohms Harmonic Harmonic Second Harmonic Third Harmonic
Ch1 -67.7 dBc -74.0 dBc -73.5 dBc -73.5 dBc
Ch2 -66.8 -74.5 -71.8 -73.3
Ch3 -73.3 -74.5 -74.8 -74.2
Ch4 -70.3 -74.3 -74.7 -73.2

How do we know what is really going on?

In the absence of an ideal quad amplifier that fits in your board, it is pretty hard to
imagine how to measure the effect of a single amplifier channel on itself. As you
have probably already realized, a given amplifier channel doesn’t just perturb its
own inputs, it also perturbs the other channels’ inputs. Ground currents flow past
all of the different channel inputs, with differing results, but all are affected by
each output. This effect we can measure.

Table 2 shows what you get when you drive just a single channel, but measure
harmonics on the other, undriven channels. The undriven channels show a tiny
signal at the fundamental frequency (board crosstalk), but they also show
distortion products! These distortion products (in the absence of any significant
fundamental signal) are directly caused by the ground currents we have been
discussing. The Low Distortion layout of Figure 6 shows greatly improved second
harmonic and THD due to the near elimination of ground current effects.

Table 2, FHP3450 harmonics with one channel driven

2Vpp out Easy Easy Easy Low Distortion Low Distortion Low Distortion
RL 150 Ohms @5MHz @10MHz @15MHz @5MHz @10MHz @15MHz
Ch1 (driven) 0 dB -67.7 -74 0 dB -73.5 -73.5
Ch2 (passive) -65.2 dBc -69.7 At noise floor -78.7 dBc -82.8 At noise floor
Ch3 (passive) -62 -73.2 At noise floor -64.7 -87.5 At noise floor
Ch4 (passive) -57 -68.3 At noise floor -68.8 -84.7 At noise floor
Ch1 (passive) -62.7 -71.8 At noise floor -65.2 -89.2 At noise floor
Ch2 (driven) 0 dB -66.8 -74.5 0 dB -71.8 -73.3
Ch3 (passive) -58.2 -71.2 At noise floor -59.3 -82.5 At noise floor
Ch4 (passive) -62.5 -69.2 At noise floor -72.2 -92.8 At noise floor
Ch1 (passive) -61.7 -71.5 At noise floor -75.8 -87.7 At noise floor
Ch2 (passive) -57.3 -70.8 At noise floor -59.3 -85.8 At noise floor
Ch3 (driven) 0 dB -73.3 -74.5 0 dB -74.8 -74.2
Ch4 (passive) -64 -70.2 At noise floor -65.8 -92.8 At noise floor
Ch1 (passive) -58.3 -72.2 At noise floor -68.8 -82.7 At noise floor
Ch2 (passive) -63.5 -68.8 At noise floor -63.8 -80.3 At noise floor
Ch3 (passive) -61.7 -73 At noise floor -71.7 -94.8 At noise floor
Ch4 (driven) 0 dB -70.3 -74.3 0 dB -74.7 -73.2
In Conclusion

I’ve simplified a bit in this article; there are usually two different bypass capacitors
for each supply voltage plus the supplies themselves. Ground return current
flows back to these points in proportion to their conductance. High frequency
signal currents return to the small bypass capacitors (I’ve made the assumption
that these are the signal frequencies we are interested in). Lower frequency
currents (such as in the audio range) might flow mostly to the larger bypass
capacitors. Still lower frequency currents might flow directly to the supply wiring
(ignoring the bypass capacitors). Your specific application will determine which
current path is most critical. Fortunately, you can fairly easily protect against all
ground current paths with a bit of thought. Use common ground points and
ground bypass capacitors on the output side if possible.

Those readers familiar with high frequency amplifiers will be worrying about
adding another constraint to board layout. The cardinal rule in high frequency
board layout is to place the high frequency bypass capacitors just as close to the
package supply pins as possible. Modifying this rule to improve distortion is not
much of a change as can be seen by comparing Figures 5 and 6. The distortion
improvements came at a cost of adding about 0.15 inches of trace to the supply
bypass connections. This has a small effect on the AC response of the FHP3450;
the 0.1dB gain flatness improved from uu to vv MHz. Also improved was
differential gain and phase keivknelwe.sd.,kd.

Board layout is crucial in wringing all of the performance from a quality amplifier.
The issues discussed here aren’t by any means limited to high frequency
amplifiers; lower frequency signals (such as audio) generally have much tighter
distortion requirements. The ground current effects might be reduced at lower
frequencies, but if the required distortion performance improves correspondingly,
ground currents are still a significant issue.