Abstract: Decoupling of power and ground-reference planes is an important issue for both EMI emissions control and for circuit functionality.  This topic has generated a lot of technical papers, and controversy.  While there has been a lot of attention on this topic, there is still significant confusion about the best strategy for decoupling.

This talk focuses on the sources of noise that the decoupling capacitors are intended to control, and the physics involved in the noise propagation, and how to properly analysis the decoupling capacitor performance.  The analysis  must be performed in BOTH the time domain and the frequency domain.  The frequency domain analysis is a steady state analysis, and will determine resonances, which are most useful for EMI emissions analysis.  The time-domain analysis is a transient analysis and will help determine how well the current is delivered to the IC, and ultimately, how large (or small) the generated noise pulse will become. Real-world examples of measurements, as well as computer simulations are used to demonstrate the optimal decoupling strategy.

Presenter: Dr. Bruce Archambeault

Bio: Dr. Archambeault is an IEEE Fellow, an IBM Distinguished Engineer Emeritus and an Adjunct Professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology.  He received his Ph. D. from the University of New Hampshire in 1997.  His doctoral research was in the area of computational electromagnetics applied to real-world EMC problems.  He has taught numerous seminars on EMC and Signal Integrity across the USA and the world, including the past 15 years at Oxford University.

Dr. Archambeault has authored or co-authored a number of papers in computational electromagnetics, mostly applied to real-world EMC applications.  He currently serves as the Past President of the EMC Society.  He is the author of the book “PCB Design for Real-World EMI Control” and the lead author of the book titled “EMI/EMC Computational Modeling Handbook”.