Articles Tagged with ''Signal Integrity''

As DDR data transmission rates continue to increase, the signal integrity of the DDR channel has become one of the most critical concerns. This article takes an extensive look at the impact of via stubs on the impedance of the signal lines on DDR4 memory, including test cases and ways to optimize design.

Time to plan your visit to DesignCon 2020! Preview some highlights here.

There seems to be more standards every day, and some have rumored that there is a movement to merge or consolidate some existing standards. We will examine some of the standards and how they came to be. For starters, we will limit ourselves to three main types of standards in the industry: on-board or internal, input/output (I/O), and networking. I/O and networking are similar, but networking standards typically apply to longer distance links than I/O standards. There is, as often happens, overlap between these types, and some, such as PCI-express, have standards that apply to more than one of them.

Optoelectronic industry designers have traditionally used discrete optical devices for transceiver designs. The process requires manual integration of discrete free-space optical components such as lasers, modulator, photo detectors, isolators, MUX/DE-MUX, lenses in the form of optical gold box sub-assemblies such as transmit optical sub-assembly (TOSA).

Eric Bogatin reviews a presentation by Terence Regan, and shares his thoughts on the topic of high-performance interconnect design and fabrication.

SIJ talked with Martin Stumpf about industry trends, how to foster innovation, and what today’s designers need most from their test equipment.

SIJ talked with Dave Kohlmeier about industry trends, how to foster innovation, and what today’s EDA customers need most.

We analyze the computational procedure specified for Channel Operation Margin (COM) and compare it to traditional statistical eye/BER analysis. There are a number of differences between the two approaches, ranging from how they perform channel characterization, to how they consider Tx and Rx noise and apply termination, to the differences between numerical procedures employed to convert given jitter and crosstalk responses into the vertical distribution characterizing eye diagrams and BER. We show that depending on the channel COM may potentially overestimate the effect of crosstalk and, depending on a number of factors, over- or underestimate the effect of transmit jitter, especially when the channel operates at the rate limits. We propose a modification to the COM procedure that eliminates these problems without considerable work increase.