Looking at a TV chassis, one still sees many discrete components between the widely used HDMI connector and the system chip. Designing each of these features individually will take some time and effort by experienced RF engineers. Today’s challenges of increased system complexities, which are to be developed at shorter time lines, can be more easily met by tapping in external resources. Taking an integrated HDMI interface solution will not only provide immediate system knowledge without the need to re-invent the wheel again — it will also save costs by reducing the device count. This does not only translate to direct savings but also to reductions in pick and place, purchasing, storage and quality costs as well. Device count reduction means lowered assembly times, and even lower investments, since one can increase the assembly capacity using existing equipment. Furthermore, it will decrease manufacturing failures. Hence the board of the future will be ‘clean’.
Figure 1: A ‘clean’ board.
The design for HDMI’s high speed data bus line for audio and video data, TMDS, is laid out to let the high frequency signals pass as undisturbed, as possible. Unfortunately, an incoming ESD pulse is nothing else but an unwanted powerful high speed signal, hence a proper HDMI layout will also be a highway for ESD to enter the system chip. Evidently, the latest system chips need to have leading edge computing power in combination with a small die size, since they are meant to handle very high signal speeds at low costs. However, this translates to a considerably higher sensitivity to ESD compared to previous system chip generations. Since an end application for consumers can be used under ‘any’ circumstances, a capable ESD protection, which does not compromise the high speed signal, is mandatory.
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