Making Successful Power Distribution Designs University of Oxford

Overview

What you will study

• ​This is the popular power distribution design course expanded with more illustrations, exercises and reliability as well as environmental topics. 
• The Making Successful Power Distribution Designs course offered by University of Oxford tutor has also many years of teaching experience as a university professor.

By taking the course:

• You will learn why - as opposed to signal-integrity noise- power distribution noise tends to be very wide band. 

• Reverse Pulse Technique, a very powerful, yet simple methodology to find worst-case time-domain PDN noise response.

• You will see that for power distribution applications, losses are many times our friends. You will learn why and how.

• We will demonstrate that 1+1 is not always 2.

• You will see live oscilloscope demonstrations of good and bad converter behaviours.

• We will show that flattening impedance profile is a very effective way to reduce noise.

• You will see the strengths and weaknesses of each and we will discuss how to select the solution suitable for your design on a DDR memory PDN example. 

• We will discuss why time domain is better suited for low duty cycle rare, but large noise events. Frequency domain is better to identify any periodic noise component.

• We will explain why impedance matrix is the good metric for PDN, yet most measurements require S-parameters.

• We will show many of the common pitfalls when FFT/IFFT is used to generate PDN response.

• We will illustrate the three-dimensional nature of current distribution at DC.

• We will learn three techniques how to suppress these resonances.

• You will receive a simple design tool, which we will use in the class to show how to design a good PLL filter.

• You will learn how to select components to meet life expectancy, why you should not use an 85-degC rated ceramic capacitor at 85 degree Celsius temperature. We will illustrate why dynamic current balancing is important for reliability. 

• We will cover the two-port measurement is the only usable approach for measuring low-impedance PDN.

• Why many suggest (wrongly!) to measure noise across capacitors.

• Discuss some ceramic capacitors and ferrites exhibit strong dependence on DC and AC bias.

• Simulate ceramic capacitors at different temperatures.

• You will learn which those are and how to handle them.

• You will learn why most blind vias can carry more current than plated through holes.

• You will see case studies when you need 1D, 2D or 3D simulators for power planes.