Analysis of power/ground planes by PCB simulator with model order reduction technique

Abstract

With the progress of integration of circuits and PCBs (printed circuit boards), novel techniques have been required for verification of signal integrity. Noise analysis of the power/ground planes is one of the most important issues. This paper describes a high-speed simulator for PCBs which contain interconnects with nonlinear terminations. This simulator is based on the ASSIST environmental tool constructed for development of the circuit simulators, and is combined with PRIMA (passive reduced-order interconnect macromodeling algorithm). In this simulator, an efficient implementation of PRIMA is considered with use of a voltage-controlled current source (VCCS) model. Finally, this simulator is applied to the analysis of power/ground planes of simple PCBs, and the validity is verified.