About the Training Course

This very popular 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 participants the power to instantly recognize and solve many of today's high-speed design problems. Topics include: driver modeling, ringing, termination, bus performance, bypass capacitors, crosstalk, metastability, ground bounce (ssn), split planes, mixed-signal isolation, and power system noise.

All delegates will receive a free copy of Howard Johnson's "High-Speed Digital Design, a Handbook of Black Magic" (Prentice Hall)

Questions & Comments: all students who attend our High-Speed Digital Design courses have the opportunity to talk directly with Dr. Johnson

Course Benefits

• This is a practical training course.
• There are many practical examples, explanations, and classroom demonstrations.
• Anyone who works with high-speed digital signals will understand and benefit from the material presented.
• No advanced mathematics are necessary.

Who is this training course for?

This University based course is aimed at Digital Logic Engineers, System Architects, EMC Specialists, Technicians, Printed Wiring Layout Professionals, Applications Engineers and anyone who works with digital logic at high speeds (20MHz to 20GHz and beyond).

Training Course Content

Vocabulary of Signal Integrity

Understand relations among time, frequency and distance; Discover uses for the lumped-element PI-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.

References

"Howard's enthusiasm for the subject was very refreshing!"
Colin Bridger, Senior Field Applications Engineer, PMC Sierra

"Excellent course - information will prove useful in daily work."
John McAuley, Hardware Design Engineer, Nortel Networks

"One of the best training courses I have ever had. Definitely served its purpose."
Seyit Karaca, Senior Engineer, Panasonic Mobile

"Presenter was very good, great at making things easy to understand."
Edel Curley, Design Engineer, Xilinx

About the Lecturer

Dr. Howard Johnson,
Signal Consulting Inc.

Dr Johnson has taught thousands of students at companies all over the world, including: 3Com Corp.; IBM; Allied-Signal; Intel; Bay Networks; Mentor Graphics; Cisco Systems; Motorola; Compaq Computer; NASA; Network Equipment Technologies; Level One Communications; Siemens; DEC; Northern Telecom; Dell Computer; Sandia Nat'l Labs; Ericsson Telecom; Sun Microsystems; GEC Marconi; Texas Instruments; Hewlett-Packard; VLSI Technology.