A new frequency domain based methodology for signal integrity analysis

The co-existence of two different sets of parameter definitions, requirements and specifications in the domain of digital system design; namely the time domain (TD) and frequency domain (FD), is imposing some challenges on digital system design. Those challenges are increasing with the increase in system speed and are hard to address using traditional methods. This paper proposes a new methodology to perform signal integrity (SI) analysis, fully, in frequency domain to help addressing those challenges. To perform SI analysis, fully, in FD it is required to build the correct system model, construct an efficient methodology and develop quantitative measures and relationships as well as correlation to TD quantities. The focus in this paper will be on the first two items where a system model and an efficient FD methodology are introduced and their accuracy, compared to TD simulations, is examined.