My name is Tim.
I'm a Signal Integrity and Power Integrity Engineer at EEsof.
Today, although the problem is in the real world,
I'm going to use simulation to show how things can be in the real world.
If you look at it very broadly, signal integrity is all around us
and is happening right now at this instant.
We have a presenter right here, the transmitter.
I'm transmitting some sort of information to all of you at this moment,
and you, as the receiver, the audience, are taking in the information.
There's also the channel in the middle, that is the air right now, the medium.
That is in a broad sense, but today, we'll talk about signal integrity
in a more narrow sense in a digital communication channel.
Of course, you have your CPU in your PC laptop or in your PC workstation,
and it's trying to talk to the LED display.
In the middle, you have all these pesky interconnects.
You have graphic cards, cables, onboard video processors.
We call them interconnects,
and as my advisor would say what signal integrity is, Eric Bogatin says,
"Signal integrity is about the problems interconnects introduce and how to avoid them."
Today, we will take a look at what signal integrity is
with a case of a failing virtual channel.
We're not breaking anything, but we are going to study this failing channel.
To do so, we'll do four major things.
Number one, we will evaluate the channel.
Number two, we will investigate the channel.
Three, we'll understand the root cause.
It's only then we can solve the problem.
The only way to solve any signal integrity problem is to understand the root cause.