System-Level Statistical Eye Diagram for Signal Integrity

Abstract

This paper reviews a statistical signal integrity (SI) analysis at the system level for a high-speed system design. An eye diagram graphically shows a system’s performance. However, an eye diagram requires a long acquisition time for accurate results. The time-consuming nature of this process makes an eye-diagram-based SI analysis inefficient. Thus, a statistical eye diagram was introduced for an efficient SI analysis. The statistical eye diagram provides not only SI metrics such as eye height (EH) and eye width (EW), but also the bit-error rate (BER) profile for each channel. The data transmitted over the high-speed channels are determined by an upper hierarchy such as a system. In other words, the data are a function of the system parameters. In conclusion, a statistical eye diagram is determined by the high-speed channels and the system parameters. Therefore, the previous works on statistical eye diagrams at the channel and system levels have been introduced, respectively. This paper reviews the previous works for a system-level statistical SI analysis with a statistical eye diagram.