Hybrid Statistical Link Simulation Technique

Accurate analysis of link performance including deterministic and random effects as well as advanced signal conditioning schemes is crucial in modern high-speed I/O design. In recent years, statistical link performance tools such as LinkLab and StatEye are introduced to efficiently analyze the overall link performance with both deterministic and random noise. The statistical-domain analysis has limitations in terms of its capability of accurately simulating system nonlinearity, jitter, as well as coding. In this paper, we present a new hybrid approach that combines statistical and time-domain techniques to efficiently overcome these limitations. The proposed method has several key contributions: 1) capture system nonlinearity; 2) separately simulate short-term deterministic jitter in the time domain and long-term deterministic and random jitter in the statistical domain; 3) co-simulate clock and data channels to capture jitter tracking; and 4) co-simulate signal and power integrity to include simultaneous switching output noise. We demonstrate this hybrid approach by studying the jitter tracking capability of a clock forwarding scheme and the effectiveness of coding in terms of system bit error rate.