How do chip design engineers make sure that there is no interference between different circuit modules due to electromagnetic fields, given that every circuit component is very close to each other?
In: 628
This is literally most of what my career consists of. The field is called Signal Integrity, and it is the science of making electrical signals go where we want them to without excessive crosstalk and interface. We design signalling schemes and interconnect with certain features that help, like self shielding, differential signaling, special kinds of encoding that are tolerant to noise, limiting the signal slew rate to just enough to get the job done, and careful layout. I have been doing this for 25 years and use a variety of concepts that were figured out back in the days of the telegraph and have been scaled down to nanometers. Much of the work starts with fundamental calculations on a whiteboard and software and measurements are used to automate and validate. Right now I work on fiber optic laser drivers and receivers for datacenter applications with signaling speeds of over 100 Gigabit per second per data lane.
Latest Answers