I knew that HDMI was a popular standard used to connect consumer products like a monitor to a laptop, but most professional video and broadcast systems use the SDI (Serial Digital Interface) connector standard. Pleora Technologies, founded in 2000, currently serves the machine vision and manufacturing markets, including those… Read More
SemiWiki readers from a digital IC background might find it surprising that post-PCB route analysis for high speed serial links isn’t a routine and fully automated part of the board design process. For us, the difference between pre- and post-route verification is running a slightly more accurate extraction and adding SI modelling,… Read More
High-speed design requires addressing signal integrity (SI) and power integrity (PI) challenges. Power integrity has a frequency component. The Power Distribution Network (PDN) in designs has 2 different purposes: providing power to the chip, and acting as a power plane reference for transmission-line like propagating … Read More
I caught up with John Ferguson of Mentor Graphics this week to learn more about a recent announcement that TSMC has extended its collaboration with Mentor in the area of Fan-Out Wafer Level Processing (FOWLP).
In March of last year Mentor and TSMC announced that they were collaborating on a design and verification flow for TSMC’s… Read More
The EDA tool offerings for printed circuit board design commonly address one of three customer markets: (1) the enterprise design team, (2) the product development engineer, and (3) the “maker”. … Read More
There’s an old adage, attributed to renowned computer scientist Andrew Tannenbaum, one that perhaps only engineers find amusing: “The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.” Nevertheless, IEEE standards arise from customer requirements in the electronics industry. Many relate… Read More
The prevailing industry trends are clear: (1) PCB and die package designs are becoming more complex, across both mobile and high-performance applications; (2) communication interface performance between chips (and their related protocols) is increasingly demanding to verify; (3) signal integrity and power integrity issues… Read More
Ground. It’s that little downward-pointing triangle that somehow works miracles on every schematic. It looks very simple until one has to tackle modern power distribution network (PDN) design on a board with high speed and high power draw components, and you soon discover ground is a complicated fairy tale with a lot of influences.… Read More
