BOARD LAYOUT
6.3.3 Board Layout Issues
The physical layout of the motherboard PCB as-
sumed in this presentation is as shown in Figure
6-10. Because all the memory interface signal
balls are located in the same region of the STPC
Figure 6-10. DIMM placement
device it is possible to orientate the device to re-
duce the trace lengths. The worst case routing
length to the DIMM1 is estimated to be 100mm.
35mm
STPC
35mm
SDRAMI/F
DIMM4
DIMM3
DIMM2
DIMM1
116mm
15mm
10mm
Solid power and ground planes are a must in order
to provide good return paths for the signals and to
reduce EMI and noise. Also there should be ample
high frequency decoupling between the power
and ground planes to provide a low impedance
path between the planes for the return paths for
signal routings which change layers. If possible
the traces should be routed adjacent to the same
power or ground plane for the length of the trace.
For the SDRAM interface the most critical signal is
the clock. Any skew between the clocks at the
SDRAM components and the memory controller
will impact the timing budget. In order to get well
matched clocks at all the components it is recom-
mended that all the DIMM clock pins, STPC mem-
ory clock input (MCLKI) and any other component
using the memory clock are individually driven
from a low skew clock driver with matched routing
lengths. This is shown in Figure 6-11.
The maximum skew between pins for this part is
250ps. The important factors for the clock buffer
are a consistent drive strength and low skew be-
tween the outputs. The delay through the buffer is
not important so it does not have to be a zero de-
lay pll type buffer. The trace lengths from the clock
driver to the DIMM CKn pins should be matched
exactly. Since the propagation speed can vary be-
tween PCB layers the clocks should be routed in a
consistent way. The routing to the STPC memory
input should be longer by 75mm to compensate
for the extra clock routing on the DIMM. Also a
20pF capacitor should be placed as near as pos-
sible to the clock input of the STPC to compensate
for the DIMM’s higher clock load. The impedance
of the trace used for the clock routing should be
). matched to the DIMM clock trace impedance (60-
75W To minimise crosstalk the clocks should
be routed with spacing to adjacent tracks of at
least twice the clock trace width. For designs
which use SDRAMs directly mounted on the moth-
erboard PCB all the clock trace lengths should be
matched exactly.
The DIMM sockets should be populated starting
with the furthest DIMM from the STPC device first
(DIMM1). There are 2 types of DIMM devices; sin-
gle row and dual row. The dual row devices re-
quire 2 chip select signals to select between the
two rows. A STPC device with 4 chip select control
lines could control either 4 single row DIMMs or 2
dual row DIMMs.
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Release B
This is preliminary information on a new product now in development or undergoing evaluation. Details are subject to change without notice.