Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) and Signal Integrity (SI)

Power Design Services has experts who work closely with our customers, and provide consulting and guidance for EMC and SI design throughout the PCB design process in the following areas:

System-Level

Architecture and floor-planning, main boards, daughterboards, backplanes, connectors, cables, grounding. Enclosure design and shielding, installation practice.

Schematic Review

High-speed signals, differential signaling, I/O interfaces (digital/analog, telecom and local-area network), magnetics, filters, connectors, power supply filtering and board decoupling/bypassing.

PCB Design

Stackup selection and layer assignment, partitioning, routing high-speed and other critical nets, termination, noise-coupling mechanisms and prevention, common-mode suppression, I/O and filtering, high-voltage clearances, power-supply, decoupling and bypassing, power and ground planes, grounding.

EMC Testing and Certifications

Work with the customer to review specifications, support testing, obtain certificates, review and troubleshoot new and existing designs.

Physical Design of High-Speed Electronic Circuits

At the speeds of nearly all electronic designs in modern technologies, the physical characteristics of the design-implementation (PCBs, packages, interconnects etc.) contribute to the behavior of the circuits as much as the parts of the electrical design that are included in the schematic. Non-intended and non-ideal characteristics such as transmission-line propagation, delay, attenuation, dispersion, finite impedance of the conductors, metal planes and power-supply structures, discontinuities due to imperfect interconnects such as power and ground inductance, properties of the connectors and selected pin out, unintended current-paths, crosstalk, emission, and immunity are some of the factors that must be considered during design. These characteristics are not included in the schematics, yet they play a significant role in the circuit performance. If not properly taken into account they will certainly lead to problems with signal-integrity (SI) and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC). Being an integral part of the physical implementation of the electrical design, they are directly influenced by the board-level and system-level features such as PCB material, size and stackup, placement of the components, decoupling and bypassing, routing topology, motherboard-daughterboard configuration, connectors, grounding, etc. Therefore they must be addressed and taken care of during transition from the schematic to the PCB and system level.