Achievements and challenges in power and signal integrity analyses of Set-Top Box products

Electrical Co-design of IC-package-PCB products for Set-Top Box applications has been changing quickly in the past years. The new generation of processors (A53, A57…) is indeed bringing interesting challenges as the business seems to be looking for the most power efficient CPU architectures (DMIPS/W). Moreover standards of high-speed interfaces are being released with increasing speeds (HDMI2.1, USB3.1, LP/DDR4…). This paper presents the achievements and the challenges in the field of IC-package-PCB electrical simulation and co-design, based on examples of recent product developments. Correlations between simulations and measurements are presented as it plays an important role in the development of the simulation methodologies. The main focus of this paper is on power analysis, power integrity (PI) studies and performance prediction. Then a case of signal integrity (SI) studies is briefly discussed. Conclusions on links between physical IC-package-PCB co-design and EM/PI/SI are presented.