One of the biggest design challenges today revolves around maintaining signal integrity in the presence of power and ground rail fluctuations due to simultaneously switching signals. This is particularly true for DDR4 memory.
DDR4 is a big step from DDR3, much bigger than DDR3 was over DDR2. Speed is going from 2133 Mb/s at the top end to 3200 Mb/s. Vdd goes from 1.5V to 1.2V. The Unit Interval (UI) shrinks from 469ps to 313ps. Channel interconnect skew and jitter easily consume 50% of the 2133 Mbps timing budget. These, combined with other factors, including the effects of DQS jitter, edge roll-off, impedance discontinuities, pin-to-pin capacitance variations, crosstalk and inter-symbol interference (ISI), make designs with DDR4 far more far more challenging to simulate and measure. One must also take into account variances in the printed circuit board manufacture, as described here "How to avoid poor serdes performance caused by circuit board manufacturing variances", as well as variances in silicon manufacture as described here "Platform Validation using Intel® Interconnect Built-In Self Test (Intel® IBIST".
Most importantly, stability of the power distribution network (PDN) plays a key role in signal integrity and operating margins of the design. The maximum ripple of the PDN is specified as +/- 60mV for DDR4 as opposed to +/- 75mV for DDR3. Simultaneous switching noise (SSN) will have a major effect – in the worst case, for example, all 64 bits of a data bus transition simultaneously, with large instantaneous changes in current across the power distribution networks (PDNs) causing fluctuations in voltage levels that impact the timing margins of the transitioning signals. These simultaneously switching outputs (SSO) affect memory and other serial I/O data integrity on the board.
Nowadays, some board designers use power-aware SI simulation tools to provide some level of assurance that things will work properly. This involves the modeling of the copper shapes that comprise the power and ground planes, as well as the vias that run through them, along with the coupling to the signal traces. These vias essentially act as radial transmission lines that excite the parallel plate plane structures, perturb the power supplied to the chips, and couple noise back onto the signals as well.
In addition, decoupling capacitors must also be modeled and incorporated into the simulation, as does the voltage regulator module (VRM).
Given the complexities of these simulations, design engineers must be cautious of relying on measurements taken with oscilloscopes which themselves contain simulations. On-chip embedded instrumentation should be used to report precisely what is being seen at the device transmit and receive buffers. Further, measurements using embedded instruments to generate worst-case bit patterns, causing SSO and the maximum amount of jitter, crosstalk and ISI, is highly recommended. These are provided by the ScanWorks High-Speed I/O and DDR test software.
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