Method of Exploring HVM Process Corner Cases for Loss and Impedance in High Speed Designs

High-speed signals are becoming more sensitive to impedance and loss variations. In this paper, we show that the correlation between factors that impact loss and impedance is weak. A methodology is proposed to find corner case loss and impedance models for a given stack-up using an inverse stack-up optimization problem (ISOP) [1]. By using this proposed approach, corner case loss and impedance models can be derived in seconds. The proposed approach results outperform the worst-case Monte Carlo analysis with uniform distribution in all the experiments in terms of accuracy and speed-up.