In another article on this site1 I discussed transmission line terminations. There are several types of termination strategies in common use on PCBs, but perhaps the two most common are parallel termination and series termination. When we use parallel termination we place a terminating resistor at the end of the transmission line. The value of the resistor is equal to the characteristic impedance of the line itself, commonly referred to as Zo. A closely related strategy is a Thevenin termination, where a pair of resistors,whose parallel combination is Zo, is used.