Engineers Face Challenges of Avoiding Power Integrity and Signal Integrity Conflicts
Accurate measurement products are needed to understand interference effects, link budgets, etc.

Power Integrity or Signal Integrity? That is the question.

Recently, with the rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the demand for signal integrity along with power integrity has increased, and countermeasures for this have become urgent.

This is because it has become difficult for devices to achieve signal integrity while implementing low current for the longest battery life in the IoT environment. Engineers in the field are faced with the situation where they have to solve the problem of conflicting high-speed signal integrity and the best power integrity for low current implementation in device design.

The signal integrity efficiency of IoT devices in actual design is known to be very sensitive to the voltage and current performance of the battery. Moreover, this problem becomes more serious as the data rate increases to Gbps. As the rate increases, more power is consumed, and to minimize this, engineers rely on topology.

For example, transmitters for high-definition multimedia (HDMI) and many other standards use reverse-matching resistors to minimize mismatch, but this can increase voltage amplitude and result in power loss.

In particular, poor signal integrity can also cause problems with data rates, frequent call drops, and pixel errors on TV screens. Any noise and instability can also cause degradation of high-speed signals. Additionally, high-speed signals are deployed more densely than IoT devices, which can result in problems such as crosstalk and coupling.

Industry officials say RF interference and digital crosstalk are common challenges when so many subsystems coexist in this way, causing interference between them and optimizing one device can have detrimental effects on other parts of the design.

Software should be used to identify, quantify, and validate crosstalk for analysis and design verification.

In other words, addressing radio frequency interference with additional shielding is 'costly' and having to check the interface every time to ensure accurate operation of high-speed signals at different voltages, temperatures, and voltage levels is 'time-consuming'.

Experts point out that to solve this, at a minimum, environmental modeling and link budget measurement and prediction for distributed systems, crosstalk, etc. are necessary.

“Engineers need to understand interference effects and link budgets to successfully design for the Internet of Things,” said Brian Fetz, Keysight Technologies. “This involves testing, probing and analyzing with the right measurement products, quickly identifying crosstalk for analysis, and software solutions that quantify and quickly verify designs.”

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