Modern electronic products operate at higher frequencies, have increased functionality, and have densely populated PCBs. On effect thereof are lower supply voltages, commonly 3.3, 1.8, 1.5 and even 1.1 V DC. All these DC voltages have tighter tolerance compared to previous product generations.

Such dense PCBs with more functionality and higher frequencies are more susceptible to coupling and crosstalk leading to unwanted signal contents in the DC power rails. Even more, transients and ripple on DC power rails can also affect signal and clock lines, leading to power supply induced jitter.

Today’s engineers need to have the right tools at hand to analyze such phenomena and make well informed decisions on what kind of improvements of the hardware design have what kind of impacts on the signal quality.

The Keysight D9010POWA Power Integrity Analysis Application running for example on the industry leading Keysight MXR Oscilloscope family, provides exactly what is needed to perform power integrity analysis and make well informed decisions.

The following screen capture shows in the yellow trace a serial data signal and in blue, captured with a N7020A power rail probe, a 1.1 V DC power rail. The lower portion depicts the eye diagram of this serial data stream with an eye width of roughly 73 ps.