Monday afternoon I attended the Tec Panel titled “Power Distribution Planes: To Split Or Not To Split” which talked about splitting the power plane in a PCB design to accomodate different power supplies. This is very common in the industry because you can reduce cost by using less layers in your design if you put multiple power supplies together on one plane.

The panel was going to be chaired by Istvan Novak but unfortunately he had to have minor surgery and couldn’t make it (get well Istvan!) so Bruce Archambeault took over as the chair and did a good job.

So the panel tried to address the issue of what happens when you do have a split power plane and than need to route signals over the plane. Of course everyone agreed to try and avoid this if possible but sometimes you can’t avoid it.

Here are some of the notes I jotted down from the various panelists:

• You need to try and quantify the EMI and SI impact of routing over a power split. You can do this by looking at the transfer impedance.
• Adding a solid plane below the split power plane can help from a little to a lot
• Another knob you can turn is trying to control the current di/dt to reduce the impact of routing over a power split
• Need to think about the return current and where it is going. You can measure/estimate the return current in the top plane to get an idea of the impact
• Using differential signals helps alleviate SI issues with routing over split planes
• Voltage islands will couple together with varying intensity based upon resonant frequencies
• Can change spacing of voltage island separation to reduce impact
• EBG structures can be used to create narrow band bandgap isolation

I think Prof. Swaminathan had an interesting presentation describing EBG structures and how they can be used to help create isolation at certain frequency ranges which can be useful for PCB designs with sensitive analog components like ADC’s that also have digital components.

We spent most of the day getting things setup and planning for the rest of the week. Unforunately we had to postpone our video interviews today due to some logistic issues that we hope will be resolved tomorrow. I didn’t get a chance to go to any of the tutorial sessions today but I did get a chance to go to the technical panel ‘Power Distribution Planes: To Split Or Not to Split?’ which was pretty interesting. I’m going to put up a post tomorrow with some of my session notes for this panel.

It was a long day of setup/planning but with the Exhibit floor opening tomorrow and a full day of papers we should get some good coverage.

If you see me around the conference be sure to stop and say hello!

We have arrived at DesignCon 2009! Be sure to follow us this week as we put up posts of the conference. XrossTalk Magazine is a media sponsor for this event and we’ll be bringing news from the conference all week.

Hope to see you there!

Just want to let everyone know that the January issue of XrossTalk is now available for download. This issue is all about next generation SerDes design and we have some great articles.

Leave your comments on this issue and let me know what you think!

Happy 2009 to all XrossTalk readers!

You can see that we have been busy here at XrossTalk making some new changes in the New Year. We have a new webiste up and running built on a much better content management system. This will help us keep the site up to date and running smooth. Take a look around and let us know what you think of the new and improved site!

There still might be a few bugs as we iron things out this week but look for the next issue of XrossTalk coming out at the end of this week!

And if you haven’t heard yet XrossTalk is going to be at DesignCon 2009 as a media sponsor so we are going to have some great coverage of the event on our site and in a special March issue!

Stay tuned for more details!

Best Regards,

Tim Coyle

Editor In Chief