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Conference Highlights:
AMI Models: How to Tell a Peach from a Lemon
Speakers: Michael Steinberger and Todd Westerhoff Day / Time / Location: Monday 1:30- 4:30 Ballroom ETrack / Format: High-Speed Serial Design / Half-Day TutorialAudience Level: Intermediate Description: Most vendors now supply IBIS-AMI models of their SerDes macros. However, the accuracy, usability, and speed of execution of these models varies widely in ways that are not immediately obvious to many users. Using real models from un-named vendors and software tools that are publicly available free of charge, this tutorial demonstrates specific desirable and undesirable model characteristics, how they affect the user, and how to test or inspect for them.
(Eligible Passes: 1-Day Tutorial Pass (Monday), 4-Day Conference Pass (Mon-Thurs).
Simulating Large Systems with Thousands of Serial Links
Speakers: Walter Katz (SiSoft), Donald Telian (SiGuys), Sergio Camerlo (Ericsson) and Barry Katz (SiSoft)
Day / Time / Location: Wednesday 10:15-10:55 Great America K
Track / Format: High-Speed Serial Design / 40-Minute Technical Paper Session
Audience Level: Intermediate
Description: While not long ago a serial link was only a couple of wires, it's now becoming common for systems to including hundreds - and even thousands - of such links. This session describes the development and analysis of a large system with thousands of serial links. Due to the system's size and complexity, the design team invested in a multi-year effort to build and qualify a virtual environment capable of both verifying connectivity and simulating any and all of the channels. Problematic channels with incomplete system-level connections, poor eye openings, or high BER are quickly identified. Performance limiters such as inherent discontinuities, cavity resonances, and Tx/Rx equalization imbalance are found and examined in detail. The virtual system is also used to guide design choices such as layer stacking, via construction, back-drilling, and trace/connector impedances. Processes to optimize and select equalization choices are also described.