Signal integrity optimization by suppressing resonance of multi-port transfer function in multi-interconnect systems

Multi-interconnect systems (MIS) have become highly popular in high-performance and high-density electrical systems design. However, the ever-increasing clock speed and the ever-complicated interconnections make signal integrity (SI) become a critical design issue and in most situations several iterations are required to achieve optimal SI performance. For the MIS with one driver and N receivers, this paper proposes frequency-domain multi-port transfer function (MPTF) to investigate the root cause of the SI problems, and offers practicable SI optimization by suppressing the resonances of MPTF. By taking a real 8-DDR3 MIS as a case study, the root cause of its SI problem is identified based on MPTF and the corresponding optimization is proved to be feasible and effective by comparing the eye diagrams before and after optimization.