Designing PCBs with High-Speed Constraints: Developing constraints

Today's high-speed busses, such as PCI-Express, DDR2, and Serial ATA, running at frequencies from several hundred megahertz to beyond a gigahertz, make for tight timing margins. Today's fine-geometry silicon makes for fast edge rates. Today's growing pressure for smaller and cheaper products makes for very dense PCB layouts. All of these factors necessitate high-speed analysis, and the subsequent generation of routing constraints, in order to implement a successful high-speed PCB design. This paper discusses HyperLynx from Mentor Graphics, which makes this analysis quick and easy.