The cost for signal integrity solutions increases nearly exponentially with bandwidth. The High Speed Digital Engineering group at CU focuses on developing technology solutions for SI that are low cost. In this paper, we show three examples of our projects. We provide analysis of a simple TDR based dielectric constant measurement technique and show the importance of some low-cost techniques to get the most out of simple structures and measurements. The simple TDR technique provides an accuracy of 3% in measuring the dielectric constant of a 2-layer printed circuit board. Low cost SMAs and PRBS generating devices are also essential in testing these simple designs, and their implementation has also been investigated.

The paper can be found here. The presentation slides can be found here. The Recorded DesignCon Presentation can be found here.