Comprehensive multilayer substrate models for co-simulation of power and signal integrity

Physics-based via and trace models have been integrated into a general method to simulate multilayer board structures. In the past, our approach has been successfully applied to link simulation and has been validated against other numerical techniques and measurements. A notable improvement of the computation speed of over three orders of magnitude has been observed when compared to full-wave electromagnetic simulations. In this paper, the models are reviewed and it is shown that they can also be applied to simulate power distribution networks with arbitrary power/ground via and plane configurations. This approach is general enough to handle indistinctively power and signal nets and it is therefore suitable for co-simulation of both power and signal integrity domains in a comprehensive and efficient manner. Different configurations are studied in this paper, including also decoupling capacitors, and the simulation results are compared against full-wave simulations in terms of accuracy and efficiency.