Fundamentals of Power Integrity for Computer Platforms and Systems

Preface

This book is an introductory text on power integrity. It is intended for students at the college under graduate level and for engineers who are new to the area of power integrity. It is assumed that the reader has some background in electromagnetics and basic power conversion. However, it has been written with an understanding that many concepts may be foreign even to engineers and thus the basics are covered first. It is also assumed that the reader has a working knowledge of how to use various tools, such as SPICE and math programs, for analysis. This text is not intended to teach modeling methods and how to use various field solvers—there are many good texts on these subjects that can be easily found through a search on the Internet or in a college library. The purpose of this book is to focus on some of the fundamentals that are key toward enabling the reader to build a foundation in understanding how to solve a basic power integrity problem without having to resort to modeling in a CAD tool—before that basic understanding ever takes place. Thus, the objective here was to focus on the tools and the methods of the problem—rather than on the tuning of the solution to the problem—which is where many good CAD programs excel.

Thus, in that spirit, I set about crafting this book with a few basic goals in mind; first, introduce the concepts of power integrity by utilizing basic analytical tools. Second, structure each chapter so that the complexity increases (for the most ...