Signal Integrity Tips

Social media can be broadly defined as "groups of people conversing and exchanging information online."

Signal integrity engineers started using social media — also known as Web 2.0 — long before it was ever called by those names: the signal integrity e-mail reflector ("si-list") fits the definition.

Ray Anderson, the founder of si-list, kindly let me post his history of the si-list:

I believe that si-list went "on the air" around May 15, 1994.

There was a short course on "Electrical Modeling, Simulation and Design of Electronic Packages" that was taught by Raj Mittra, Paul Franzon and Jose Schutt-Aine in San Jose, CA on May 9-12, 1994. During the last day of class we passed around a blank piece of paper collecting e-mail addresses from anyone who wanted to be included in a proposed signal integrity email list. When I returned to my office at Sun Microsystems the following Monday I put together the initial si-list with about 30 subscribers from the previous weeks short course. Now, about 14.5 years later we have somewhere around 3500-4000 subscribers.

So the si-list even predates that milestone moment of "Web 1.0": the IPO of Netscape on August 9, 1995.

But besides the si-list, which other social media sites do you and your colleagues use for work and pleasure? Take this fun, quick, informal, unscientific poll and get instant gratification of seeing the tally so far.

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If you use site that is not listed below, please also leave a comment by clicking the link in this post. Also please add a comment if you have thoughts about this topic.

If you want more information on social media take a look at Social Media Overview by Gregory Go on About.com or the Wikipedia article on social media.

MP3 podcast of this post, What Social Media Web Sites Do Signal Integrity Engineers Use?.

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Guest post by Eric Bogatin, signal integrity evangelist.

We microwave minute-rice to cook it faster. We get our news from the one liners of late night talk show comedians. In this perspective, I gave a talk — as a distinguished lecturer for the IEEE EMC society — on "Ten Habits of Highly Successful Board Designers." Everyone is welcome to download a full copy of my presentation. Colin invited me to post this summary here. If you get your philosophy of life from bumper stickers, then you’ll want to design your boards based on these ten rules, presented for your entertainment:

1. Use as low a differential impedance as you can get away with.
2. Keep the differential impedance of signal lines constant by adjusting line width when the coupling changes.
3. Use tightly coupled differential pairs when interconnect density is critical, use loosely coupled differential pairs when loss is over riding.
4. Keep the length skew between the lines in a pair less than 60 mils/(bit rate in Gbps)
5. When possible, route the signal lines off axis from the glass weave.
6. Minimize the discontinuity of DC blocking capacitors by using the minimum size capacitor pads and use cut outs in the nearest ground plane when the pad width is larger than the surface trace width.
7. Keep the length of via stubs, in mils, as short as possible, and no longer than 300 mils/(bit rate in Gbps).
8. Increase the impedance of vias by removing NFPs (non-functional pads on intermediate layers) and use as wide a clearance hole as you can get away with.
9. Use a return via adjacent to all differential signal vias.
10. Use pre- or de- emphasis on TX and equalization on the RX.
11. Bonus pointer: Ask your fab vendor for smoother copper.

Visit Eric’s blog by clicking here.

Ten Habits Of Highly Successful High Speed Serial Link Designers - MP3 version.