Power Integrity

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Contradicting the Common Belief: Decoupling Capacitors - Is More Always Better?

In the process of circuit design, electrical engineers must carefully position capacitors to decouple the power supply pins of integrated circuits (ICs). Yet, relying solely on a single capacitor for this purpose may potentially decrease the performance of the Power Delivery Network (PDN). Therefore, there exists a need for an elegant and systematic methodology in designing the PDN while utilizing a single capacitor. Within this paper, we analyze the single-capacitor scenario within the context of the PDN and introduce a systematic approach for its design. This approach not only suggests clear guidelines for when favoring a single capacitor over multiple capacitors is appropriate but also showcases that when these guidelines are exceeded, this method can be implemented recursively to achieve an optimal PDN solution.


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Noise in Traffic: Signal Emulation for Automotive Apps

DesignCon 2023 Best Paper Award Winner

Automotive applications present new challenges to high-speed serial technology. Asymmetric, multi-gigabit signaling between sensors, processors, and displays in the unique noise environments of both electric and internal combustion engine vehicles create new problems for signal and power integrity engineers. This paper introduces the signal impairments required for receiver testing in the emerging automotive standards like ASA, MIPI's A-PHY, Automotive Ethernet, and more. Standards specify different sources of noise in different ways, some in the form of time evolutions, others as spectra. This paper focuses on techniques for generating and calibrating each noise source while describing advanced de-embedding techniques and addressing test equipment limitations.


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Breaking Loop Inductance into Pieces

Inductance and resistance are fundamental to the design and analysis of Power Delivery Networks (PDNs). Excessive inductance and resistance can cause several severe power and signal integrity problems, as well as design failure. As we have seen, inductance can certainly be a confusing parameter. The type of the extracted resistance and inductance (loop or partial) depends on how the ports are connected to the model in the simulation. Consequently, their connection in the electrical circuit and the level of voltage details we can get from the simulation results will be determined. In many cases, it is required to know the voltage drop on the PWR path and on the GND path separately, therefore it is necessary to use partial inductances and resistances. The method of expressing SLI with partial inductances and the ideas behind it are briefly described in this paper.


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