‘IR Drop Analysis’ – How important is it in today’s high-speed designs?

PCB designers need to know the importance of proper power delivery for successful board design. Integrated circuits need the power to turn on, and ICs with marginal power delivery will not operate reliably. Since power planes can take up a significant portion of the board and impact all subsequent place and route steps, you must ensure proper power delivery early in the design cycle.

IR drop distribution in Sigrity PowerDC

IR-drop analysis is a critical aspect that helps designers optimize their circuits for better performance, power consumption, and area efficiency. With IR-drop analysis, the PCB designer can see where a plane has too many holes, a trace is to narrow and too long or there are not enough vias placed. In these cases, the voltage drops. The resistance can be calculated with a field solver and a simulation shows the results for current, voltage drop and temperature increase. 

3D Current distribution in Sigrity PowerDC

Power/ground paths should have low resistance. The goal is to ensure that minimum power is dissipated as heat in the system. Each voltage drop will generate heat and might cause thermal issues with some components close by. When the voltage drops to much, the supply voltage might reach the lower tolerance of the supply voltage and the electronic components fail.  

Power Integrity experts can spend weeks fully analyzing a power delivery network, but DC IR drop is the first step in PDN analysis to ensure successful power delivery. Power integrity is an important consideration in advanced devices as it is deeply related to many signal integrity problems.

Comment here on how you simulate IR Drop in your PCBs. Any recommendations to minimize IR Drop?