Design Automation


Advanced PCB power integrity analysis

24 June 2009 Design Automation

Mentor Graphics has announced delivery of its HyperLynx PI (power integrity) product addressing the needs of advanced designers of high performance electronic products.

The product provides easy to learn and use setup and accurate analysis of today’s power plane structures, enabling teams to design working power delivery systems while reducing design cycle times, prototypes and manufacturing re-spins, as well as product cost.

With today’s high performance/density/pin-count ICs, power delivery systems design requires tight collaboration between the engineer and layout designer to ensure that clean, sufficient power is delivered to the ICs through multiple PCB power and ground structures. Coupled with the HyperLynx product suite for signal integrity (SI) analysis and verification, Mentor is now providing users with a comprehensive solution for high-performance electronic product design.

The drive to lower power in today’s products has led to high performance ICs using multiple voltage levels, some of which are very low. With lower voltages, the DC power and noise margins are very small. This creates the need for multiple power delivery structures on a PCB and the need for that power to be exceptionally clean. The first issue is defining the power and ground split-planes to avoid excessive current densities and DC voltage drop. The HyperLynx PI product provides both pre- and post-layout analysis of irregular power and ground plane structures incorporating the exact IC pin locations and models. The results of the analysis can be both visual and textual, enabling the designer to quickly identify and resolve power and/or ground plane structure problems.

The second issue is the integrity, or absence of noise, of the delivered power. The designer needs to determine the number and location of decoupling capacitors and the goal is to save component cost and board area by avoiding over-conservative (excessive) use of bypass capacitors. The designer may also want to experiment with the PCB fabrication materials and stack-up to determine the best electrical and cost solution. The HyperLynx PI product provides accurate analysis of the power integrity, enabling the designer to determine the best number, placement and values of the decoupling capacitors. With this information, the designer can perform correct-by-design layout of the power structures and decoupling capacitor placements for single-pass power integrity design.

The HyperLynx PI product is tightly integrated with the HyperLynx SI product suite which includes complete signal integrity and delay analysis functionality for classical parallel (synchronous), advanced-memory (DDR, DDR2, DDR3 – source-synchronous), and SERDES serial (asynchronous) bus interconnects.



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