Analytic termination metrics for pin-to-pin lossy transmission lines with nonlinear drivers

A significant percentage of the critical nets in high-performance systems are of the pin-to-pin type. To optimally design these nets such that signal integrity is preserved, efficient analytical metrics for transmission line termination are a valuable part of a system-level designer's toolset. Using the symbolic moment-based expressions in this paper, proper termination can be determined via a single-step procedure, without any preprocessing steps and/or time-domain simulations. Driver nonlinearities and effects of nonzero rise-time are also considered in the proposed termination methodology.