Featured Stories

Elephant

What Exactly is Power Integrity?

Larry Smith and I address this question in the preface to our new book. We found this question to be a little like the story of the five blind people and the elephant. They each are asked, what is an elephant? Depending on what part they were facing, imagined the elephant as that feature: a wall, a rope, a tree trunk, etc.
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Fig1

How Bad are Swiss Cheese Planes?

Holey Swiss cheese offers a popular metaphor for describing planes with a high density of clearance holes, usually under a BGA escape. The concern of many designers is the impact on the inductance in the power and ground planes due to all those holes. Since the gaps between them is narrow, won’t they constrict the current, dramatically increasing the series resistance and the loop inductance of the planes?


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Figure 7

Sources and Compensation of Skew in Single-Ended and Differential Interconnects

VNA measurements showed that the board-to-board skew distribution of realistic board topologies/routes can be broad, and the peak measured skew was quite significant. Post processing of TDR data suggested that long routes parallel to the board edge may be particularly susceptible to skew variation due to the glass weave.
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