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What’s your excuse?
Over the last few months, I’ve visited dozens of customers talking with them about power distribution design. Power Distribution design on the PCB is one of those areas that is fairly new to many...
View ArticleDo you want to be a professional?
Over the last few days, I’ve been in some interesting discussions, the crux of which revolved around “why would anybody care about doing analysis?”. It’s an interesting question. Why does Company A...
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Fundamentals of SI (Part 1) – Critical nets
To begin this series on fundamentals of signal integrity, lets start at the very beginning. Before you start doing any type of simulation or analysis, what do you have to do first, what information do...
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Tired of waiting for your SPICE to finish?
Anyone who has ever had to simulate a SERDES interface knows how long it take to run a couple hundred bits through a SPICE model. Hours. Sometimes you have to kick it off overnight. And if you want...
View ArticleMaking SERDES sims faster with IBIS-AMI
You may have heard lately about IBIS-AMI models, which are being used more often for SERDES simulation. IBIS-AMI stands for I/O Buffer Information Specification Algorithmic Modeling Interface. These...
View ArticleS-parameters are for more than just packages
In the digital design world, we have typically only seen S-parameters used to model packages. They are a popular output of 3D field solvers like IE3D. But more and more, especially in SERDES design,...
View ArticleHow do you manage your trace lengths?
Too often I see people just using straight length to manage their board timing. Or take it one step further and turn length into propagation delay.You know, 1 inch is about 166ps. Which is true, but...
View ArticleVias are longer than their length
Yeah, that’s what I said. Vias are longer than their length. Phrased more appropriately, the delay introduced by a via has a lot more to it than just the length of the via. For starters, signals...
View ArticleThe length of your terminator doesn’t matter
Many designers go to great lengths to make sure they do appropriate length-matching, even to the level of including the lengths of their terminators (resistors) in their routing. Although this seems...
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