Design of high speed physical layer interconnects through system modeling, simulation and correlation

Hardware Design for electronic systems is progressively increasing in complexity due to shrinking sizes and increasing data rates. This does not affect the system performance at lower frequencies but as frequencies increase, the analog effects come to affect the digital characteristics of the signal. The PCB traces no longer acts as conducting wires, but as transmission lines. It becomes necessary that the design engineer consider and include these effects in their calculations and correlate it with actual measurements to make sure that system performs as per specifications. This paper outlines the design flow for one of the interfaces and follows up with the measurement correlation to validate the system model. The correlation level of the simulation indicates the confidence level for the system model. This confidence level can be used to normalize the results for the simulation for which a corresponding measurement cannot be obtained.