Customer Reviews

Jitter, Noise, and Signal Integrity at High-Speed

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The jitter area was really needing some new books and altough this book should be added to the library of any engineer working on jitter (there are not that many) it does fall short from what the author promisses. He does present a good initial discussion on the different types of jitter but the presented mathematical framework (mainly based on linear system theory) is very dry (sometimes of no use apart from some formalism) and provides little help to the engineer doing real work. More important the author basically presents mainly presents his work and forgets a significant large amount of published work from other people (for a first book on jitter in several years the reference sections are very very poor). The Signal Integrity aspect the book is extremly poor and the loopback testing section is useless (again forgeting a lot of industry work already available).

Unbelievable also is no in dept discussion on the jitter details of any standards (PCI expres, etc...) altough the author was part of some those comittes. The arguments presented against the BER Q based jitter separation algortithm are strange (he states that since an erfc() function is not part of the C++ standard library it is not easy to write the code !!! There are several free implementations of the erfc() function available) for good and bad this is the algorithm on the PCI Express II standard and just because he is not the inventor of the algorithm we engineers need to use it and a fair and wider discussion was needed.

The text does contain some errors and for a book that has so many equations the author should have used a word processor that could make the text/equations more easy to read (e.g. latex) and not MS word.

But at the moment there is not to much in the jitter area in book form. So if you have the time to spend on it go ahead.

This book covers the state-of-the-art knowledge in high-speed wireline communication, including jitter analysis, system architecture, clock and PLL fundamentals as well as many more critical and advanced topics. It addresses cutting edge technology in the fields of design, modeling, and verification. It is one of the best books and must have so far in this area. Dr. Li's instrumental book can provide students, engineers, or researchers solid knowledge to understand, design and test high-speed
serial interfaces.

Statistical methods are being combined with signal integrity methods for high-speed, high data rate, lossy
channel design. This book becomes a valuable resource for defining, classifying and providing the
mathematical basis and graphical insight for jitter and noise terminology and the related techniques that
are now becoming commonplace in EDA tools, presentations, application notes, and used in several standards.
Even IBIS is adding an algorithm modeling interface feature to help access propretary information provided
by semiconductor vendors for more efficient channel analysis and design optimization.

Some inconsistent font sizing within equations and elsewhere are annoying. However, the book's primary
value is that it becomes a new base-line for general and reasonably comprehensive information on jitter
and noise methodology for today's needs and future advances.

In this book, Mike Li offers an experienced perspective of the role jitter and signal integrity play in modern high-speed communication. While incorporating his own contributions to the modeling and testing of jitter in systems, his book provides a broader basis of understanding to the student seeking to build a foundation on the complexities of signal integrity at high-speeds.

The material of this book is a significant departure from other texts that discuss high-speed signal integrity. It focuses on the fundamentals of how different phenomena lead to different source of jitter and ISI and how we, as system designers, can untangle these problems. The text seeks to clearly distinguish different definitions of jitter and how these variously used terms are interrelated. Most importantly, the flow of the book helps demonstrate how jitter propagates through the system and helps analyze jitter in different system blocks.

This an important and exciting are at the heart of future high-speed electrical and optical and this is one of the first books that deciphering the challenges facing engineers in maintaining communication reliability.

This is one of the very few books that covers an important topic in high speed serdes products. Typically you have to troll IEEE journals etc. which cannot be as broad as a book. So good job by the author on that.
Also he does a good job explaing the concepts on jitter and decomposition etc.

The fonts (on equations) and sentence wording need polishing up but those are minor nuances.

My background: I have 15yr experience doing analog IC design.

This is one of the best books available today for people who need to quantitatively deal with jitter/BER etc. in high speed serial communication though one book does not fit to all.

This book is not a tutorial or a how-to book which helps us quickly obtain some basic knowledge and apply it to fix relatively simple problems we face. This book is not a collection of examples/practices in which we try to find similar problems and solutions to our own problems.

In order to tackle more difficult/complicated problems, we would need more sophisticated knowledge/tools or we may even need to develop them ourselves upon existing knowledge base. This book serves as a text book describing such knowledge base by arranging the development in the past decade in orderly manner so that we can learn them in shorter time than reading a lot of articles one by one.

The problem here is occasional bit error in a high speed serial link. In order to deal with the "occasional" error occurrence, statistical treatment is required. The problem occurs in a system. Most of actual systems can be approximated by linear systems, or linear approximation usually provides us with good insight. Thus the basics of statistics and linear system are reviewed at the beginning. Jitter discussion begins with categorizing jitter in various components, which are related to the bit error rate. These jitter components are to be obtained from actual measurements in practice (there are several methods), and used to estimate the possible bit error rate of a system. Then after discussing the jitter behavior in PLL and clock signal, modeling high speed serial link (Tx, channel and Rx) is discussed.

If a reader is more interested in signal integrity than jitter/bit error rate, he/she may not be satisfied with the amount of the signal integrity discussion in this book. What matters in the end, however, is bit error rate not signal integrity. He/she has a good chance to be back to this book after learning more about signal integrity itself.

This book has introduced the new concepts and techniques on jitter and noise. In the first half of the book, I found all the upto date information not only on concepts and terminologies, but also the mathematical models behind them. That makes this book useful for both novice and experts. As an very active player in the SerDes testing world, I found myself interested in even some of the introduction sections because of the math and modeling in a graphical view.

In older books, you can NOT find the new jitter and noise separation/interaction described in this. In some new ones, it does NOT have this much of detail. The second half of the book is particularly helpful for people that are getting into the practical test and measurement of jitter and noise for high speed serial links.

Near the end, the book dig into the design concept to give just enough concepts for a test engineer to understand why he is seeing what he is seeing.

Over all, this is a book that can be used by a novice to get started in this fast paced new field, and it can also serve as a good reference for experts to dig out just what you need - a equation for a rough estimate, or a plot to help visualize the trend in your mind.

Yi Cai, Ph.D.
Technical Manager
Read-Channel & PHY Core IP Test Engineering and Characterization
Storage Peripherals Group, LSI