High-Performance System Design Conference An Overview of Signal Integrity

Data communication rates have increased tremendously over the past 5 years in order to accommodate the exponential growth in data transmission. It is common today to have serial data streams in storage area networks that exceed 2 Gb/s and it is expected that high-speed serial signals in backplanes will reach 6.25 Gb/s in 2003. Consequently, the minimum pulse width of these serial data streams have decreased to less than 500 ps, reducing the noise margin significantly. Insuring signal integrity at these data rates has become increasingly difficult for designers and engineers of systems and components. This paper will provide an overview of signal integrity and the associated measurement instruments that enable designers and engineers to fully characterize high-speed serial or parallel communication systems. This paper will focus on the information that can be obtained from eye diagrams and the importance of quantifying the various components of jitter in order to diagnose and eliminate design problems. Other topics in this paper include: how to measure jitter output and jitter tolerance for design characterization and compliance on systems and components, how to generate and verify various jitter components, why peak-to-peak and rms values alone are not good metrics for quantifying jitter. Actual test setups and methods for applications such as Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet, Infiniband, PCI Express, XAUI, LVDS and clocks/oscillators will be discussed. Dr. Patrin is currently the Director of Product Marketing at Wavecrest. He has more than seven years engineering and marketing experience in scientific instrumentation and semiconductor capital equipment. Prior to joining Wavecrest, Dr. Patrin worked as a staff engineer and engineering manager for a semiconductor capital equipment company. He received a BS in physics from St. John's University in Collegeville, MN and a Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He has published 15 papers in technical journals and has two patents and one pending.