Re: Signal Integrity
Signal Integrity, sometimes known as SI, refers to electronic circuit tools and techniques that ensure electrical signals are of sufficient quality for proper operation. Alternatively, Signal Integrity tools attempt to identify and remove effects that cause a design to malfunction due to distortion of the signal waveforms. In integrated circuits, or ICs, the main cause of signal integrity problems is noise induced by neighboring connections, or crosstalk. In CMOS technologies, this is primarily due to coupling capacitance, but in general it may be caused by mutual inductance, substrate coupling, non-ideal gate operation, and other sources. Induced noise can have many drastic consequences for digital designs:
it can make the design work incorrectly in some cases, or even fail completely
it can make the design slower than planned
it can create yield problems.
Signal integrity primarily involves the electrical performance of the wires and other packaging structures used to move signals about within an electronic product. Such performance is a matter of basic physics and as such has remained relatively unchanged since the inception of digital computing devices.