Electronic circuit card having transient-tolerant distribution planes

摘要

An electronic system contains a backplane circuit card which supplies power to various modules. Embedded power distribution planes each include one or more islands, each island being associated with a respective module. The island is electrically isolated from the body of the power plane except at a relatively small area, called the power ramp. The electronic current path from the power plane to the module goes through the power ramp and the island. Preferably, a pair of adjacent power planes at +48 VDC and 0 VDC are in the middle layers of the backplane with a ground plane on either side. Signal planes carrying circuit patterns for multiple data signals are deposited as additional layers on either side of the ground planes. The pair of power planes are nearly identical patterns, the differences being the location of power connections for the modules. In particular, the islands and power ramps are located in the same places on each power plane. This causes substantially equal but opposite current densities in the power planes, so that transients induced when a module is removed from or inserted into a powered-on system are significantly reduced. The exemplary embodiment is an intelligent redundant array of independent disks (RAID) storage server having concurrent maintenance capability.