Sink or Swim at 28 Gbps

How do you know that your signal integrity software is qualified for the analysis of interconnects with signals running at 28-32 Gbps? The software vendor told you so? How does the vendor know? Most of the time, it is the "sink or swim" situation for the SI software user. One way to figure it out is to use a validation platform such as Wild River Technology's CMP-28/32 Channel Modeling Platform providing interconnect structures specifically designed to benchmark the signal integrity software at these data rates. Just run the post-layout analysis of interconnects on the validation platform and compare with the pre- qualified measurements taken by an expert up to 50 GHz. The validation process may be that simple in general, but has some peculiarities discussed in this article.