Signal Integrity: Tips and Tricks

Signal integrity (SI) engineering has become a necessary requirement for today's high-speed logic signals. It is now critical to gain control of crosstalk, ground bounce, ringing, noise margins, impedance matching, and decoupling (all of which relate to signal integrity) to have a successful design. Signal integrity describes the environment in which signals must exist. It covers the various techniques and design issues that ensure that signals are undistorted and do not cause problems to themselves, to other components in the system, or to other systems nearby. This white paper describes the theoretical background behind signal integrity and discusses some SI engineering techniques.