Electrical-thermal co-design of high speed links

This paper demonstrates that determining the electrical and thermal sensitivity of the system and its components is important to a successful electrical-thermal co-design of a high speed data link. A temperature control setup that can thermally isolate each component of a data link is presented. The transmitter, receiver, PCB and other parts of a data link running at 3.2 Gbps were tested at temperatures between 0°C and 95°C. Component performance and system timing margin have been measured over different voltage and temperature conditions. The data are analyzed to find the test conditions under which the system has the best and worst timing margins. The conditions are subsequently used as the input parameters to the co-design process flow that involves: design for experiments, system simulation, and system model validation. The simulated system margins are found to correlate to the measured values, thus the system model is validated. The model can be used as a tool to analyze system performance over a larger variety of operating conditions.