A Cancelation Method of Mutual Inductance Between Capacitors in EMI Filter

Parasitic mutual inductance between capacitors is critical for the high-frequency performance of electromagnetic interference filter. In this article, a new cancelation method is proposed to eliminate mutual inductance completely without adding additional components. The principle of the cancelation method is to design the layout of input and output traces, and the mutual coupling of traces can be equivalent to adding a negative inductance on the transfer branch of the filter to cancel the mutual inductance between capacitors. The two cancelation designs of the filters with small and large capacitor spacing are proposed, respectively. Then, the filter model is established in the finite-element method analysis tool, and the mutual inductances under different layout parameters are calculated to explore the recommended layout, which is to make the negative mutual inductance of traces fully offsets the positive mutual inductance between capacitors. Finally, the effectiveness of cancelation method and the accuracy of model are verified by experiments. The method can significantly improve the filter performance without extra costs and is expected to become a filter design that can be widely promoted.