December 8, 2003 -- As modern signaling standards push digital designs to the gigahertz and gigabit ranges, interconnect performance becomes the key factor in enabling reliable system operation. Signal integrity issues such as reflections, crosstalk, frequency-dependent transmission-line loss and dispersion can significantly degrade system performance and reliability.
The ability to simulate and accurately predict the effect of these signal-integrity issues is critical to achieving a working design, and this ability is contingent on the designer's ability to obtain accurate interconnect models for each part of the interconnect link-from the driver chip, through the package into the daughtercard; through a high-speed backplane connector to the backplane, and to the cable interconnect between subsystems.
By Dima Smolyansky. (Smolyansky is co-founder and product marketing manger at TDA Systems.)
This brief introduction has been excerpted from the original copyrighted article.
