Making Successful Power Distribution Designs

Overview

What you will study

​This is the popular power distribution design course expanded with more illustrations, exercises and reliability as well as environmental topics. The Making Successful Power Distribution Designs course offered by University of Oxford tutor has also many years of teaching experience as a university professor.

By taking the course:

• You will learn why - as opposed to signal-integrity noise- power distribution noise tends to be very wide band. 

• Reverse Pulse Technique, a very powerful, yet simple methodology to find worst-case time-domain PDN noise response.

• You will see that for power distribution applications, losses are many times our friends. You will learn why and how.

• We will demonstrate that 1+1 is not always 2.

• You will see live oscilloscope demonstrations of good and bad converter behaviours.

• We will show that flattening impedance profile is a very effective way to reduce noise.

• You will see the strengths and weaknesses of each and we will discuss how to select the solution suitable for your design on a DDR memory PDN example. 

• We will discuss why time domain is better suited for low duty cycle rare, but large noise events. Frequency domain is better to identify any periodic noise component.

• We will explain why impedance matrix is the good metric for PDN, yet most measurements require S-parameters.

• We will show many of the common pitfalls when FFT/IFFT is used to generate PDN response.

• We will illustrate the three-dimensional nature of current distribution at DC.

• We will learn three techniques how to suppress these resonances.

• You will receive a simple design tool, which we will use in the class to show how to design a good PLL filter.

• You will learn how to select components to meet life expectancy, why you should not use an 85-degC rated ceramic capacitor at 85 degree Celsius temperature. We will illustrate why dynamic current balancing is important for reliability. 

• We will cover the two-port measurement is the only usable approach for measuring low-impedance PDN.

• Why many suggest (wrongly!) to measure noise across capacitors.

• Discuss some ceramic capacitors and ferrites exhibit strong dependence on DC and AC bias.

• Simulate ceramic capacitors at different temperatures.

• You will learn which those are and how to handle them.

• You will learn why most blind vias can carry more current than plated through holes.

• You will see case studies when you need 1D, 2D or 3D simulators for power planes.