High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic [Hardcover]

Howard Johnson (Author), Martin Graham (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0133957241 | ISBN-13: 978-0133957242 | Publication Date: April 18, 1993 | Edition: 1

Focused on the field of knowledge lying between digital and analog circuit theory, this new text will help engineers working with digital systems shorten their product development cycles and help fix their latest design problems. The scope of the material covered includes signal reflection, crosstalk, and noise problems which occur in high speed digital machines (above 10 megahertz). This volume will be of practical use to digital logic designers, staff and senior communications scientists, and all those interested in digital design.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Focused on the field of knowledge lying between digital and analog circuit theory, this new text will help engineers workng with digital systems shorten their latest design problems. The scope of the material covered includes signal reflection, crosstalk, and noise problems which occur in high speed digital machines ( above 10 megahertz). This volume will be of practical use to digital logic designers, sstaff and senior communitions scientist, and all those interested in digital design.

From the Back Cover

Focusing on a combination of digital and analog circuit theory, this comprehensive volume will help engineers who work with digital systems, shorten their product development cycles, and fix their latest high-speed design problems.

• Covers signal reflection, crosstalk, and noise problems that occur in high-speed digtal machines (above 10 megahertz).
• lncludes checklists that ask the questions an experienced designer would about a new system.
• Offers useful formulas for inductance, capacitance, resistance, rise time, and Q.
• Explains the trade-offs between signal cross talk, mechanical fabrication of tolerances, and trace routing density.
• Presents a methodology for determining how many layrs will be required to route a printed circuit board.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (April 18, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0133957241
• ISBN-13: 978-0133957242
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #100,701 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #57 in Books > Computers & Technology > Hardware > Microprocessors & System Design

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book, but don't be led astray, March 3, 2002

By 

Mike Morgan "Mike" (Minnesota, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic (Hardcover)

First, I'll critique the sub-title: a handbook of Black Magic. High-speed digital design is not black magic. It is the application of science. The sub-title does the book a disservice.

Second, I should caution young engineers that the authors of this book enumerate several stratagems in high-speed design; some good, some bad. That is, not all of the tricks in later sections are sound engineering practices. Experienced engineers will be able to differentiate between sound engineering practices and hacks, and when compromises should be made. Young engineers may be lead astray too easily.

Lastly, this book is a good book if you already know something of the subject. If you had only to buy one book, I'd recommend "High-Speed Digital System Design: A Handbook of Interconnect Theory and Design Practices" ISBN: 0471360902.

After reading that book, I'd purchase this book, as this book has some practical information, for example, on choosing capacitor dielectrics, oscillators, etc., not contained in the first.

31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Useful book if you need a cook book, however ........, May 3, 2004

By 

Jim Connors (Los Altos, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic (Hardcover)

This book is useful if you want to have a long series of equations available in one place to jog your memory. But if you want to learn something useful and practical- and real-world - then perhaps you would be better off doing a web search for application notes, tutorial papers, and articles, particularly from semiconductor manufacturers, and vendors of high-performance test equipment such as Agilent, Tektronix, and others.

To take one example (page 134,) Johnson purports to describe problems associated with a wire-wrapped prototype processor board containing TTL devices operating at high edge rates ( 2 ns.) According to Johnson, the design engineers failed to realize that the circuits would ring excessively, making the board unusable. To "prove" this he posits a model consisting of a 30 ohm TTL driver, with a 2 ns rise time, a 4" length of wire with 89 nH of self inductance, and a 15pf load - a series LRC circuit. Yes, this circuit will ring wildly, but the model is totally incorrect. The TTL input is not considered, which has a relatively low input impedance in the low state since it is current operated. This circuit -effectively a parallel LRC - does not ring nearly as much, as any experienced engineer knows. As a reality check, remember that wire wrap was successfully used for years by thousand of engineers. To listen to Johnson, though, this technology is almost unusable. Wire wrap circuits do ring, but under his example, the real amount of overshoot/undershoot is well within the limits of TTL. Further, no real circuit produces textbook looking traces, so the role of experience is to learn what worst-case design means, and what is acceptable for good manufacturing yield. Lesson: real experience teaches you how to produce correct, functional models. An incorrect model will cause you grief.

Much could have been done here, to be useful, by way of analysis and of recommendation. The wire should have been modeled as part of a transmission line, not as a lumped element, which any high speed digital design engineer would know, and the idea of terminating a transmission line should have been introduced. This is standard fare. Even with the series LRC, instead of deriving the formula for critical damping, he instead says: "This approximation (reduce Q to .5) is derived from the solution to a second order linear differential equation describing an RLC low pass filter. First find the point at which the derivative of the solution passes through zero (a maximum point) and then evaluate the solution at that point."

Got that? Take the derivative of a solution you want to find? Any book on circuits will reduce this to the solution of a quadratic equation. Obfuscating something that's really elementary does not help produce genuine insight. But this is what Johnson does throughout the book.

Isn't it simpler to say that if you have fast rise time signals, treat most connections as transmission lines, and add termination resistors? As for a series RLC, use the formula for critical damping: R = 1/2 (sqrt(L/C))

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great mixture of theory and practical examples., March 4, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Oslo, Norway) - See all my reviews

This review is from: High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic (Hardcover)

Being a hardware designer for DSP and CPU boards, this is the most interesting book I have read the last 10 years. I read the entire book nodding my head and saying "This all makes sense". All the theory is there, but what makes it readable is the autor's comments on what really matters; such as: "The inductance of vias is more important than their capacitance to digital designers"