An introduction to the evaluation of the effects of high power microwave signals on signaling systems

As microelectronic technology progresses, the vulnerabilities of different circuit types to various physical effects also shifts with the integrated circuit (IC) size, materials, specific circuit design and similar factors. At the University of Maryland, a systematic study was undertaken on the effects of high-power microwave (HPM) excitation on IC behavior, which demonstrated the wide variety of effects of HPM coupling into the signal or power traces of an IC, such as bit errors, unwanted bias level changes, and increased power consumption [1,2]. We are working towards assembling a knowledge base on the frequency and power ranges of susceptibility for different families of circuits. In this present work we study “chip-to-chip” board- or mainframe-scale signaling schemes between ICs. Here we compare the HPM effect vulnerabilities of single-ended (SE) and low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS).