Pat Zabinski, Principal Engineer, Mayo Clinic
Ben Buhrow, Project Engineer, Mayo Clinic
Barry Gilbert, Ph.D., Staff Scientist and Director, Mayo Clinic
Erik Daniel, Ph.D., Staff Scientist and Deputy Director, Mayo Clinic

Signal integrity analysis often involves the development of design guidelines through manual manipulation of circuit parameters and judicious interpretation of results. Such an approach can result in significant effort and sub-optimal conclusions. Optimization routines have been well proven to aid analysis across a variety of common tasks. In addition, there are several nontraditional applications where optimization can be useful. This paper begins by describing the basics of optimization followed by two specific case studies where nontraditional optimization provides significant improvements in both analysis efficiency and channel performance.