tp_EMI_Control.pdf

TECHNICAL PAPER MEETING EMI REQUIREMENTS IN HIGH SPEED BOARD DESIGNS WITH ALLEGRO PCB SI By Zhen Mu Cadence Design Systems, Inc. Even though Signal Integrity (SI) is becoming more and more critical in today’s high speed Printed Circuit Board (PCB) designs, electromagnetic interference (EMI) tests remain the only standard for an electronics product to go to market. This paper first presents the concept that good SI consideration on a high speed board design is essential in producing a board having the fewest EMI problems. It then discusses the tasks of enforcing EMI rules and the necessity of integrating automatic EMI rule checking into high speed PCB design flow. The paper finally presents the rule sets provided by EMControl, a module in Allegro PCB SI Expert, and how these rules can be automatically checked with the corresponding functionality.. I. INTRODUCTION As signal speed transferred between chips and boards through packages goes up, it becomes more and more difficult for electronic products to pass EMI standard before going into market. Every component inside a product box has to be carefully designed to minimize EMI impact on the final system. As the significant radiating component, high-speed PCBs need great attention to eliminate the causes that may fail EMI certification tests. Although there are many modern high-speed PCB analysis tools available to identify design problems, EMI effect remains as the one that is almost impossible to be simulated in a complete and accurate fashion. To obtain accurate radiation effect, differential and common modes of emission have to be simulated for every net on board and the resulting electromagnetic fields in all directions need to be combined. Considering the large amount of nets (thousands of them, in many cases), it will take an un-realistically long time and require many trade-offs to reach a solution. And such trade-offs then sacrifice accuracy of results. The fundamental object