Design Integrity

Electrical rule checks (ERC) are now available to deal with increasing PCB design complexity, speed project delivery and protect the intellectual property within them.

A side-channel attack is a form of reverse engineering that takes advantage of the information leakage from electronic circuitry. And it is a major risk to design security.

Advanced PCB and IC technologies have to be matched with advanced design and analysis tools if companies are going to produce board designs that are right first time, on time.

‘Envelope tracking’ is not a new technique; it has been known about for more than 50 years. But it could greatly help the power consumption challenges once more facing mobile handset design.

New to Signal Integrity analysis, or just need to brush up on the fundamentals? If so, this white paper is aimed at you. This white paper starts at the very basic, actually before the fundamentals, answering the question “What do I need to know?” The paper begins by identifying and analyzing critical nets. Next, it [...]

High-speed digital drivers need a good source of power to produce clean, fast signals. For a driver to switch the state of a signal in tens or hundreds of picoseconds, the power plane must be able to supply significant current over a wide bandwidth. The surge in current creates voltage fluctuations in the power distribution [...]

Signal integrity (SI) issues have been around for a while, the result of ever-faster edge rates. Both SI and PI problems manifest themselves as data errors. Indeed, PI problems are often misdiagnosed as SI problems. As such, an understanding of power delivery issues is essential to the success of any board project, as is a [...]

You must find, fix and design out signal integrity problems before committing to hardware. Simulation is the key.

The earlier in a design cycle a decision can be made, the shorter the development time and the lower the development cost. This is probably the most important product development principle, and is especially true when interconnects are not transparent and signal or power integrity could be holding back performance. You must find, fix and [...]

The contributor supplies high-end military communications systems to both the US and Canadian Navies and here describes the development of a new methodology and also a new backplane for a system that is now being retrofitted onto all ships in Canada’s fleet. The project represented a tipping point. In specific terms, the changes were undertaken [...]