Enabling Constraint-Driven Design With the pre-layout testbench built, populated with relevant models, and producing realistic simulation results, it is time to get constraints in place to drive and control the physical layout of the serial link. This may cause some refinement and iteration of the testbench in order to add additional detail, and this is expected. The approach at this point is to parameterize key elements of the testbench, sweep them to quantify their impact on the performance of the overall interface, and constrain those parameters to ensure that our design will meet the specification when finished. In the case of PCI Express Gen 4, the core requirement is for an eye height of at least 15mV and eye width of 0.3UI (which is about 19ps for a 16Gbps data rate), at the target bit error rate (BER) of 1e-12. So what types of parameters are of interest to sweep? Let’s start with the SerDes devices. They will generally have circuit models with Fast and Slow corner parameters for silicon process/temperature/voltage (PVT), so that aspect should be covered. They may not necessarily be modified or controlled if you are the designer of the PCB, but their effects should be accounted for in sweep simulations, as your PCB will need to work under those conditions. Also, if you are able to obtain package models for the SerDes that cover the min/max range of interconnect parasitics, those should also be included. The same goes for connector and AC coupling cap models. For the PCB interconnect, start at the transmitter footprint and work your way to that of the receiver. Today’s devices have fine pin pitches, and it is often necessary to neck down the line width and spacing of diff pairs in order to “break out” or “fan out” from the part. Those geometries will generally have a different (higher) impedance than out on the main part of the board, so that will impose an impedance discontinuity. How long can the fanout traces be before they cause a problem? This needs to be considered at the receiver end of the link as well. Once out on the main portion of the board, the line width and spacing of the diff pair should be swept to replicate the impedance tolerances expected for the PCB (+/-10% is common). Also, it may be impractical to keep the differential traces together all the way across the board. They may need to spread away from each other and be briefly uncoupled to go around an obstacle, or even to connect up to the AC coupling caps. This will change the characteristic impedance. How long can they go uncoupled? How long can the pin escape traces for the cap be? Does that have a significant impact on the result? And where do you locate the caps? Near the transmitter? The receiver? Does it matter? Sweeping the location can quantify the effect. What about the length tolerance between the positive and negative legs of the differential pair? Do the routed lengths need to be matched to +/- 1 mil in the layout? Or is it OK to allow 10 or 20 mils of difference? Remember, it is just as important to figure out what does not matter as it is to figure out what does. Crosstalk can have a major effect on serial link interfaces. If there is enough space on the board, it may be convenient to simply apply constraints for sufficient spacing around the diff pair to take crosstalk off the table as an issue. But many designs are too dense to accommodate that approach, which means that the spacing and coupled length of other signals to the differential serial link need to be considered and swept as well. Overall length of the link is another basic factor. The equalization of the SerDes devices are designed to counteract lossy interconnect, but there are limits to what they can do. A very important parameter to determine is how long the overall routing can be, and still produce spec-compliant results. These considerations do not comprise an exhaustive list of constraints to consider, but provide a good start: Fanout routing line width, spacing, length Main routing layer assignment Nominal differential line width and spacing Impedance tolerance Max uncoupled length Max via count Differential phase tolerance Max length from AC coupling cap to transmitter or receiver Max length of overall serial link routing Minimum spacing and max coupled length (parallelism) to other signals Via structure definitions Incorporating these parameters into your pre-layout testbench enables them to be swept, and their impact quantified. The deliverable from this work is a realistic, implementable, and quantified set of constraints that can be imported into the physical layout process, and used by the layout designer to control the placement and routing of the critical serial link interface with automated Design Rule and Electrical Rule Checks (DRC/ERC). It is common for the layout designer to request some relaxation or modification of the initial routing rules. This is a natural part of the process, as sometimes some minor changes can enable a much cleaner and efficient design to be produced. And with the pre-layout testbenches in place, it should be straightforward to adjust some parameters, re-sweep, and assess whether the requested changes will significantly impact margins. This “negotiation” process may traverse several iterative loops, and will likely result in a better finished product. The end goal from an SI perspective remains for the routed design to cleanly go through final verification and compliance checking, and produce acceptable margins. Figure 8 – Incorporating constraints into layout to enable constraint-driven design Next time > Efficient Interconnect Extraction Author Biography Ken Willis is a Product Engineering Architect focusing on SI solutions at Cadence Design Systems . He has nearly 30 years of experience in the modeling, analysis, design, and fabrication of high-speed digital circuits. Prior to Cadence, Ken held engineering, technical marketing, and management positions with the Tyco Printed Circuit Group, Compaq Computers, Sirocco Systems, Sycamore Networks, and Sigrity . More about Signal Integrity: How to Address the Challenges of Serial Link Design and Analysis Why SerDes Signaling Is Trending Towards PAM Encoded Signals How to Build an IBIS-AMI Model (Video)![]()
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