Book excerpt: Consistently Design PDNs That Deliver Reliable Performance at the Right Cost Too often, PDN designs work inconsistently, and techniques that work in some scenarios seem to fail inexplicably in others. This book explains why and presents realistic processes for getting PDN designs right in any new product. Drawing on 60+ years of signal and power integrity experience, Larry Smith and Eric Bogatin show how to manage noise and electrical performance, and complement intuition with analysis to balance cost, performance, risk, and schedule. Throughout, they distill the essence of complex real-world problems, quantify core principles via approximation, and apply them to specific examples. For easy usage, dozens of key concepts and observations are highlighted as tips and listed in quick, chapter-ending summaries. Coverage includes • A practical, start-to-finish approach to consistently meeting PDN performance goals • Understanding how signals interact with interconnects • Identifying root causes of common problems, so you can avoid them • Leveraging analysis tools to efficiently explore design space and optimize tradeoffs • Analyzing impedance-related properties of series and parallel RLC circuits • Measuring low impedance for components and entire PDN ecologies • Predicting loop inductance from physical design features • Reducing peak impedances from combinations of capacitors • Understanding power and ground plane properties in the PDN interconnect • Taming signal integrity problems when signals change return planes • Reducing peak impedance created by on-die capacitance and package lead inductance • Controlling transient current waveform interactions with PDN features • Simple spreadsheet-based analysis techniques for quickly creating first-pass designs This guide will be indispensable for all engineers involved in PDN design, including product, board, and chip designers; system, hardware, component, and package engineers; power supply designers, SI and EMI engineers, sales engineers, and their managers.