DesignCon 2024 just announced its Best Paper Awards winners, and Signal Edge Solutions' Chief Technologist, Benjamin Dannan was honored alongside his colleagues, Steve Sandler, Picotest.com, Heidi Barnes, Keysight Technologies, Idan Ben Izra, Broadcom, and Yu Ni, Monolithic Power Systems.
DesignCon Selection Process
DesignCon submissions are judged on the merits of the paper as well as the quality of their delivered presentation during the event. The DesignCon 2024 nominees were announced late last year, after a review by members of the DesignCon Technical Program Committee, who rank the papers based on quality, relevance, impact, originality, and lack of commercial content. Winners are then chosen from the finalists based on the quality of their presentations as judged by attendee feedback at the conference.
The winning paper titled "Design, Simulation, and Validation Challenges of a Scalable 2000 Amp Core Power Rail" was presented in Track#10 (Power INtegrity in Power Distribution Networks, Powe Supplies & Power Delivery).
Abstract:Â This paper will demonstrate how to measure, model, and validate a scalable, 2k-Amp core power rail. The technological growth in Data Centers, AI, Graphics, and Super-Computing has pushed the core power rail current to 2k-Amps and is climbing. Designing such a power rail is a complex task, involving architectural design choices as well as simulation and validation challenges. Lower core voltages reduce power but also reduce operating noise margins. Combined, these require greater expertise in design choices, much greater simulation accuracy, and more rigorous validation of the power rail. This paper will address this 2k-Amp project from the beginning with a variety of architectural design choices and resulting modeling and simulation challenges, including cascaded VRMs, current sharing, and thermal simulation. The assessment of PDN impedance has become a well-published mantra, and yet core power rail validation generally requires time domain testing as well as impedance testing, which presents yet greater challenges. Therefore, the final validation of this design is done using time domain testing at full ASIC power with dynamic modulation at package speeds of up to 100MHz to address the large signal response phenomenon. Simulation to measurement correlation will be shown for electrical and thermal behavior.
At Signal Edge Solutions we are experts in the field of power integrity and signal integrity. Free feel to contact info@signaledgesolutions.com to work directly with a technical expert. We are here to help you with your measurement, simulation, and modeling challenges.
Other blogs and links to check out:
Why Using a 2-Port Probe for PDN Impedance Measurement is Important for Power Integrity Engineers (signaledgesolutions.com)
The Challenge of Measuring a 40 uOhm (2000 Amp) PDN with a 2-Port Probe – How Much CMRR is Needed? (signaledgesolutions.com)