All Systems Go! Ensuring Power Integrity—Explore, Design, and Verify

By Brad Griffin

When designing an electronic system, ensuring power integrity (PI) is all about making sure that the power you are putting into the system reaches the downstream components in an efficient, sufficient, and stable manner.

In the not-so-distant past, ensuring the PI of an electronic system was a relatively simple and pain-free task. Many products involved a single PCB populated by readily available off-the-shelf ICs, such as the classic 7400-series devices from Texas Instruments. For the purposes of PI, these ICs, were presented in low pin count. Coarse pin pitch packages could be treated as closed boxes represented by simple power models.

Meanwhile, in the case of traditional multi-board systems, the boards were typically plugged into—and powered by—a common backplane. This meant that, from a PI perspective, so long as each board met its total power budget, the boards could be largely designed and verified in isolation.

Figure: Data flow for full-system PI analysis

Time marches on, and so things have indeed changed.  

How so? Continue to read the rest of this blog post on I-Connect007.