053 Mastering Power Integrity with Signal Integrity and EMC Foundations

Power integrity, PI, has emerged as the latest and still growing challenge for electronic designs, as the landscape for the three disciplines Signal Integrity, Power Integrity and Electromagnetic Compatibility has shifted. While signal integrity, SI, and electromagnetic compatibility, EMC, still pose challenges, their disciplines and the possible pitfalls and their solutions have been more widely studied and understood. Power noise, and its impact on SI and EMC, on the other hand, creates daily new challenges and their solutions are still being worked out. Whether it is component characterization or high-speed channel link budgeting, the power integrity tasks can not be successfully solved without taking into account the signal integrity and EMC principles.

This unique course focuses on PI with a broad and unified outlook to SI and EMC. It shows that not only the underlying physics, but also many design rules are essentially the same across these disciplines and the seemingly contradictory rules are the result of different initial conditions.
The course is based on forty years of teaching, research and successful industrial design experience. It shows working and proven design practices and pitfalls to avoid. It will illustrate live HW and SW demonstrations, ranging from a variety of home-made tools to professional commercial HW and SW.
This course is a must for system board and package designers, power engineers and their managers as well as for silicon designers who want to understand the application environment of their chips.

This unique course provides a unified analysis and design approach to the power-integrity, signal-integrity and electromagnetic compatibility disciplines with the main focus on power distribution network design, validation, testing and simulations. It emphasizes the most recent challenges that the digital and mixed analog/digital designers face, with time devoted to signal integrity analysis, design methods, solutions and component selection.
We will deal with the underlying physical rules with minimal mathematics. With interactive software and live hardware and software demo illustrations, the various good and bad design choices are explained and trade-offs are shown for achieving high-performance yet cost-effective designs.
Among others, the course shows why PI requires the impedance, whereas SI requires scattering parameters for their designs and validation processes.

Participants will learn how bit error rate (BER) and jitter depends on power noise, how to analyse and minimize their effects. You will also learn the surprising fact that conductor surface roughness is actually more detrimental for low-frequency power distribution than for high-speed signaling. We also show the counter-intuitive fact that current distribution in conductors is not uniform even at DC, resulting in geometry-dependent extra losses.

The course provides an overview of power distribution design methodologies and shows that worst-case power noise and worst-case high-speed eye closure can be calculated based on the same principles. Cost-effective PCB stackup, material and component choices are discussed together with simulation and measurement solutions for power distribution networks and high-speed signaling. The course also shows how to select, characterize and measure DC-DC converters and power filters.

Participants will receive several of the tools and simulation files shown in the class as well as the book Power Distribution Design Methodologies. There is an option to purchase the book Frequency-Domain Characterization of Power Distribution Networks at a special discount, available only to course participants.

The course is aimed at engineers, scientists and managers facing signal integrity integrity challenges in electronics designs for the computer, communications, consumer, medical, defense or automotive industries.

Only basic understanding of electronic circuits is assumed because the course is delivered through practical illustrations and examples and emphasizes the understanding of the underlying physics.

Whether you are already knowledgeable in circuit design or in the theory of signal integrity, you will find many useful tidbits and a solid explanation of the signal-integrity discipline.