Contents I. Introduction
As technology improves, consumer electronics such as computers seek for slim size and lighter weight. The best solution to achieve the smaller form factor is to decrease the layout area, the thickness of the printed circuit board (PCB), and the overall layer count. As a result, power and ground planes are usually shrunken. In addition, with the densely-populated signal vias, the power and ground shapes are usually made broken by the anti-pads. When power and ground shapes are broken, the overall power delivery path would deteriorate; as a result, voltage drop or IR drop from source to sink would increase and system would likely fail due to lack of enough supplied voltage. Recently, challenges in power integrity has been widely discussed especially in IR Drop [1] [2] [3]. In conventional designs, in order to improve on IR drop, increasing power and ground shapes, adding additional power via arrays are proven to be effective [4] [5] [6]. However, the abovementioned methods require additional PCB layout space and extra cost. In addition, by adding additional power via array, ground planes can be made broken, causing deterioration in signal integrity.
