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Signal integrity handbook takes practical approach

Provides digital engineers with measurement-centric analogue insights

"A Signal Integrity Engineer’s Companion", by Geoff Lawday, David Ireland and Greg Edlund aims to be a practical guide to signal integrity (SI) engineering over the complete product life cycle from feasibility study to verification, and drawing on both test-and-measurement and simulation approaches to the subject. Existing texts on the subject focus on the tasks that face the digital engineer but are, says Lawday, frequently founded on a theoretical approach, using simulation and modelling, and assume that the reader has a thorough understanding of the analogue principles that underlie the behaviour of the digital signals. However, according to the authors – Lawday is a university professor, while Ireland is a manager with Tektronix, both in the UK – this is increasingly not the case. In a career that has focussed on digital design, many engineers simply have not had time to acquire a deep knowledge of those analogue phenomena. High-speed serial buses are one of the technology areas – a “whole new domain,” Lawday says – that demand knowledge of both domains, to design and debug successfully. Therefore this text aims to present a practical approach with a high level of content based on measurement techniques. Simulation is not neglected – Eklund is a senior engineer with IBM, and contributes content on the modelling dimension – as the book aims to present the role of simulation tools and their relationship to real-time T&M.
Case studies, that include DDR2 and PCI Express, cover start-to-finish treatment of frequently-encountered design problems, including ensuring that interfaces consistently operate with positive timing margins without incurring excessive cost; calculating total jitter budgets; and managing complex trade-offs in high-speed serial design. In examples such as that of jitter budgeting, the authors set out, in spread-sheet style, every contributing factor that affects the overall performance of the system or interface. They explain the theory underlying each element on the spreadsheet, how you might estimate or measure them in order to arrive at realistic values for each, and how they might be affected by external factors. Test and measurement tools covered include oscilloscopes, logic analysers, signal sources, spectrum analysers, and their probing systems. Techniques such as TDR (time-domain reflectometry) are described and their strengths explained. A chapter is devoted to achieving compliance to independent standards.
Published as part of the Prentice Hall series on Modern Semiconductor Design, at a list price of $95. More information here.