Signal integrity factors in high speed multi-board test setup

There has been rapid improvement in mixed signal System on Chip (SoC) designs used in storage technologies with high-speed interfaces such as SATA 6G (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment), SAS 6G (Serial Attached Small Computer System Interface), USB 3 (Universal Serial Bus), and memory devices such as DDR2/3 (Double Data Rate). The design of such products is trending towards reduction in size of Printed Circuit Board Assemblies (PCBA) used. Development of such high speed PCBAs for storage products requires performing functional and other parametric tests for which special test platforms are needed. Such test platforms are often multi-board systems with each board in the system having highly complex devices that are sensitive to various signal integrity factors. This paper presents few of the important factors that are to be considered while designing such systems.