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Low power, high performance circuits are often plagued by power supply related issues.  This common occurrence is frequently due to mythical (or misapplied) rules-of-thumb.  These rules of thumb often lead us in the wrong direction, making things worse rather than better.  In this article, I’ll highlight some of the most common mistakes engineers make and share some fundamental rules for designing clean power for sensitive circuits.  Applying these rules will result in higher performance, lower cost designs with fewer design iterations.

This design guide focuses on small form factor and low power IoT products. Even though these sorts of products are not in the same performance class as server motherboards, not paying attention to signal and power integrity design principles at the beginning of the design cycle may require multiple board spins to get your IoT product working.

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.

In the GB/s regime, accurate modeling of conductor loss and phase delay is a precursor to successful high-speed serial link designs. In this paper, a practical method to model effective permittivity and phase delay, due to conductor surface roughness, is presented. By obtaining the dielectric and roughness parameters, solely from manufacturers’ data sheets, phase delay and effective permittivity can now be easily predicted. Detailed case studies and several examples test the model`s accuracy.

It is a well-known fact that electromagnetic radiation can be emitted from the edges of printed circuit boards (PCBs). When a current carrying via passes through two or more reference planes, an EM wave propagates radially away from the via within the cavity.  It is guided by the respective planes; much like a water ripple will propagate radially away from a rain drop hitting a puddle of water. When the wave meets the PCB edge, the two reference planes form a slot antenna and will radiate noise with the potential to generate electromagnetic interference (EMI) to nearby equipment.