How Can We Help?
Until we thoroughly understand your Signal Integrity challenges, we don’t know how we can help. The essence of a targeted solution is to first know the target.
That said, over the past 16 years of working to address SI challenges with many large and aspiring corporations, the same situations and problems come up time and time again: -
- A company has spent countless dollars on Signal Integrity seminars for their engineers; they know the SI theory but not put it into practice. Let’s cross this bridge.
- A company has put engineers through the EDA tool vendor’s training class but the class didn’t get as deep as what’s needed to do boards right now. Training is much more productive when it’s done with meaningful, real data: We can use your board as the training platform and get the board done at the same time as training.
- ‘We don’t have time for training right now; the project’s hot and we need to get these boards done now and done right!’ Let’s get the board done and come back to targeted training later.
- ‘We spent the last three weeks laying out the most dense board we’ve ever done and now you’re telling me we need to add how many termination resistors?’ Integrate the SI tools in the design flow and optimize the complete design process to avoid rework and last minute changes.
- Even worse, the board is in the lab or (here’s the real killer!) the prospective customer’s hands and you simply can’t explain those devious “soft errors”. Let’s get a post-route analysis done right now to find where the problems are and fix them.
- ‘We’re too busy debugging boards in the lab to even think about putting SI up-front in our design flow.’ Be bold and change the design methodology; stop wasting time and money and missing the market window.
Maybe one or more of these points strike a chord, maybe not. That doesn’t matter. Your unique situation and solving your problems is all that matters.
Why STEP RESPONSE SI?
Expertise, of course, but that’s not all. As the name suggests, we’re geared towards on-demand engagement when you need it. You need immediate results and we respond accordingly. Together, we’ll develop the plan and get the job done. It’s teamwork with one goal in mind – results.
Our focus is on the practical application of Signal Integrity tools and techniques directly on your boards, working as an extension to your design team, either at the system architecture and planning stage or during detailed design.
Core Competencies
- System and board SI planning: I/O buffer technology, class and drive characteristics; impedance, topology & termination characterization; board-to-board; board-to-connector/cable; stackup planning; routing constraints; corner-case characterization.
- System and board post-route SI analysis: Compliance to interface standards & protocols; I/O limits and parameters compliance; impedance, crosstalk & timing analysis; corner-case analysis.
- High-speed memory interfaces
- Multi-gigabit Serial I/O interconnect modeling & simulation
- SPICE, S-Parameter and IBIS simulation; FPGA and silicon vendor Design Kit simulation