Ensuring Data Integrity And Performance Of High-Speed Data Transmission

In key electronics applications such as data centers, automotive, and 5G, the data speed and volume are increasing at an exponential rate. Data centers require data transmission (Figure 1) as high as 112Gbps, which can be achieved only using PAM4 signaling. The automotive industry is dealing with the challenges of transferring data between various electronic control units (ECUs) at a very high data speed reaching gigabits per second, mostly on two pairs of wires, while struggling to manage the impedance. In 5G, the quantum of data that must be processed at the edge nodes and the data centers is massive. The devices must be equipped to deal with these speeds and to make control decisions in a timely fashion.

One of the critical challenges the semiconductor industry is facing is to maintain the data integrity as the demand for bandwidth increases, straining the bandwidth of the existing cloud data center server, storage, and networking infrastructure. The primary workhorse technologies for these bottlenecks are system-level signal and power integrity (SI/PI), which require modeling and simulation of the various pieces of interconnect that are used before the system is fabricated. One example is power delivery across the full system, typically through high-speed connectors and cables, which requires interconnect modeling and simulation and sets the need for a next-generation 3D field solver. These challenges are no longer a single board problem or a single package problem but a problem for the entire Rigid-Flex design.

We detail a tool for semiconductor and systems companies to design robust applications, addressing complex EM challenges involving complex 5G and 112G communication networks and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), HPC, machine learning (ML), and internet of things (IoT) applications with gold-standard accuracy.

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