Signal integrity issues in ASIC and FPGA design

Most often when addressing electromagnetic compatibility issues in the electronic design of analog and digital circuits, EMC principles such as grounding, coupling, emissions, shielding, etc. are commonly scrutinized. Studies and research within EMC normally extends to the more fundamental principles of interference and compatibility as developed from the basic framework of electromagnetic theory. This framework has lately been extended to include computational methods for the solution of interference problems that are otherwise difficult to address analytically. However, it is usually observed that newly designed hardware first encounter electromagnetic interference in the area of signal integrity where the design must overcome the inherited electromagnetic constraints imposed by high speed logic and the very low noise threshold levels of analog components. Addressing the most important signal integrity issues in digital electronic design, and which are common to most present design, are briefly covered in this paper, as well as the relevance of such issues to the electromagnetic compatibility principles previously mentioned.