Establishing Confidence in PDN Simulation

The goal in any product design is to meet performance and schedule goals at the lowest practical cost. In our globally competitive environment, if your product doesn't meet all three goals, your competitor's product will. To find the optimum design, it is not cost effective to build a bunch of alternative designs and measure which is the lowest cost version that still works. A more efficient process is to use a simulation tool to explore design space and to evaluate the final performance of a design before you commit to hardware. It is always going to be less expensive to "build" virtual prototypes than real prototypes. In addition to all the important features a tool must have, like flexibility, ease of use and integration into your existing EDA framework and design flow, it's important to use a tool that is accurate enough. This report reviews a validation study for the Mentor Graphics HyperLynx 8.0 PI tool to establish confidence in using it for power integrity analysis. For this validation study, we compare the results of the HyperLynx 8.0 PI tool to an analytical example and to a test vehicle with a series of plane cavities having 0603 capacitors integrated to the board.