Three Formats
High-Speed Digital Design
Introduction to Black Magic
with
Dr.
Howard Johnson
This popular and practical two-day workshop covers the important and timely issues involving high-speed digital design and signal integrity. Developed specifically for engineers and designers who work with high-speed digital signals, this workshop will give you the power to instantly recognize and solve many of today’s high-speed design problems.
Read about signal integrity.
Main Topics
| Driver modeling | Crosstalk |
| Ringing | Ground bounce (ssn) |
| Termination | Split planes |
| Bus performance | Mixed-signal isolation |
| Bypass capacitors | Power system noise |
Course Syllabus
Introduction
- Understand relations among time, frequency and distance
- Discover uses for the lumped-element PO-model
- Define and measure parasitic inductance and capacitance
- Compare capacitive and inductive coupling.
Properties of gates
- See why switching too fast degrades noise margins
- Discuss benefits and pitfalls of IBIS
- Investigate ground bounce (SSN) and five ways to fix it
- Observe metastability in a working flip-flop (video demonstration)
Using your oscilloscope
- Study types of probes
- Understand how probes load your digital circuit, and distort the waveforms
- Model distortion due to probe ground connection
Transmission lines
- Define characteristic impedance and delay
- Discuss physical fabrication issues
- Present the time-space diagram for transmission-line analysis
- Memorize examples of unterminated line performance
Ground planes and layer stacking
- Develop intuition about return current and crosstalk
- See how cuts in the reference plane degrade fast signals
- Look at the effect of split power plane and split ground planes
- Develop strategies for isolating analog and digital mixed-signal regions
- Review the ultimate thick-board stackup
Terminations
- Compare source termination, end termination, both-ends termination and AC termination
- Design a split-end termination
- Calculate effect of loading on bus performance
- See examples of first-incident wave and reflected-wave switching structures
Building a rock-solid power system
- Present a standard electrical model for a capacitor, supported by actual measurements (video demonstration)
- Look at new capacitor packages
- Model arrays of capacitors, and whole power systems, using Spice
- Plot performance of dual-value arrays
- How to pick values
Who should attend?
- Digital logic designers
- System architects
- EMC specialists
- Technicians
- Printed wiring layout professionals
- Applications engineers
- Anyone who works with digital logic at high speeds (20MHz to 20GHz and beyond)
This is a practical course. It is filled with examples, explanations, and classroom demonstrations. Anyone who works with high-speed digital signals will understand and benefit from the material presented.
Who has participated in this workshop?
Originally developed for the University of Oxford, this workshop has been presented by Dr. Johnson for thousands of engineers in both public and private forums worldwide. Past participants represent a wide variety of organizations, including:
| 3Com | Honeywell | Nortel Networks |
| Agilent | IBM | Qualcomm |
| AMD | Innoveda | Rockwell-Collins |
| Boeing | Intel | Samsung |
| Cisco Systems | Lockheed Martin | Sandia National Labs |
| Compaq | Mentor Graphics | Sun Microsystems |
| Dell Computer | Motorola | Tektronix |
| Ericsson | NASA | Texas Instruments |
| Hewlett-Packard | Nokia | VLSI Logic |
What people are saying
"Simply put, the best class I've had in 20 years at HP, at M.I.T., or at U.C. Berkeley, by 20 decibels!" - Systems Development Engineer, Hewlett-Packard
"I did everything you suggested and my board worked the first time! I also modified an older board and saw an immediate improvement in EMI performance. Your class really works!" - Senior Design Engineer, 3Com
"Howard Johnson did a great job. he is knowledgeable, articulate, and thorough." - On-Line Systems Developer, Dell
"Should be a mandatory course for engineers and layout people." -Advisory Engineer, NASA
"The course was fantastic. The course was really the finest, most useful, and stimulating continuing education course I have ever taken. I would give it the highest rating available, and will recommend it to everyone. [Dr. Johnson] was eloquent, intelligent, concise, humorous, and extraordinarily knowledgeable of not only the subjects' theoretical treatment but also how to apply quick, real-world solutions to real-world problems." -Field Applications Engineer, Hewlett Packard