Foreword: Special Section on Addressing Signal and Power Integrity in Future Generation Systems—Part I: Technology and Design Considerations

Ensuring signal and power integrity (SPI) is a primary concern for the electronic packaging community. The continuous increase of operating frequencies, combined with more and more aggressive miniaturization and integration strategies, poses tremendous challenges to designers. Every transistor must receive power with reduced noise, and all signals must be received properly, despite the plethora of signal and power degradation effects due to crosstalk and electromagnetic interaction, losses, and dispersion due to material nonidealities, reflections due to mismatches, and discontinuities, just to name a few. Proper handling of such effects requires precise characterization through modeling, suitable design strategies to minimize them, and the technological ability to realize the design.