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PCBD-Oct2017

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12 The PCB Design Magazine • October 2017 by the I-Connect007 Team When we began planning this issue on sig- nal integrity, we arranged a conference call with a variety of industry experts. Mike Steinberger of SiSoft, Mark Thompson of Prototron Circuits, and Yogen and Sunny Patel of Candor Indus- tries joined editors Andy Shaughnessy, Patty Goldman, Happy Holden and Publisher Barry Matties on the call for a spirited discussion about the challenges related to signal integrity and some of the tricks of the trade for helping ensure SI. From the Front End Steinberger began by sharing two issues he's been studying, one large and one small. "The large point is in the analysis of error-correcting code performance on high-speed serial chan- nels. When you look at the drive toward PAM4, it is absolutely essential that you bring error- correcting codes along. The fact of the matter is that, when you have a fair amount of mar- gin, NRZ does better than PAM4; but when you start reducing the margin, the PAM4 bit error rate doesn't degrade as quickly as the NRZ bit error rate degrades. So when you're starting to get the minimum amounts of margin, then FEC is the way to go. But it's FEC operating in a con- dition where it's got a relatively high error rate. So error-correcting codes come as an essential technology along with PAM4. "But I think that the benefits of error-cor- recting codes have been oversold, in that the performance analyses for error-correcting codes have been based on assumptions that are ap- propriate for radio channels, like where you have a lot of added noise—so a satellite chan- nel or something like that. Therefore, the errors are completely uncorrelated. On high-speed serial channels, the errors are more correlated than that, and people have not done the per- formance estimate while taking this correlation of errors into account. I did some simulations and was able demonstrate that the correlation of errors is due to the inter-symbol interference. FEATURE

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