John Dunn, Senior Engineer, AWR

This tutorial shows the signal integrity engineer how ground is defined in electromagnetic simulators, and how to correctly choose among various grounding options. Many modern simulators now support the notion of local grounding, where different ports can use different ground definitions. We show how this flexibility in selecting ground can help the engineer characterize board, package, and interconnect performance. Several specific examples at the board, package, and chip level are discussed. The tutorial concludes with circuit tricks that can be used to aid in ground studies.