Power Integrity

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Here’s what you need to do to enter to win copies of 9 books to round out your SI/PI library—one is out of print and one is hot off the press.

Measuring small resistance values is not trivial, but since 1861, when Lord Kelvin invented the Kelvin bridge,¹ we at least have a solution for measuring very low DC resistances: the four-wire Kelvin connection (see Figure 1). We measure the resistance by sending a known current through the resistor and measure the voltage drop using separate wires.

Over the years, I have presented to and worked with thousands of engineers, from very young to very old. Many of the problems they bring to me have a small set of common answers. I’ve collected these into 20 basic rules of engineering.

Here are some holiday or birthday shopping ideas for the geeks on your list!

How will the technology inside the data center change to support the latest high-traffic needs?

We searched for a superior cable for PDN measurements, then decided to create our own. Here’s the story.

The goal of power integrity (PI) analysis is to ensure not only sufficient but also stable power to all chips in a system. This article uses the example of a DDR4 application to explain the choices surrounding the use of decoupling capacitors to reduce impedance, and which performance parameters are critical to success.

Recently, Signal Integrity Journal caught up with Todd Cutler, Keysight’s VP and General Manager for Design & Test Software about product development, innovation, and the latest developments in SI/PI design.

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.