HN Books @HNBooksMonth

This is part of the field of Signal Integrity within EE - a rabbit hole which I decided to base my career on. For anyone desiring more detail (with some minimal EE knowledge as a prerequisite), two of the most popular texts are: High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic by Johnson/Graham and Signal and Power Integrity - Simplified by Eric Bogatin.

https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp...

https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Power-Integrity-Simplified-Pre...

⬐ jcims

Not the same but related, I got started down the road of (RF) DSP a while back and just got to the wtf parts, particularly around handling errors, where it really did kind of feel like magic.

I couldn’t hack the deep end of the math pool though and tapped out, but the awe remains. ‘The Signal Path’ and ‘w1aex’ are two YouTube channels i still subscribe to for my fix. Watching a waveform on a scope writhe around like a silent theremin when you just move a cable or even wave your hand past it really drives the point home.

I found this article too basic to be actionable.

Here is a thorough reference on the subject from Artech: https://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Microwave-Grounding-Artech...

A related classic is: High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0133957241

You should probably start by saying what you already know so we can tailor the responses. For example

Basic: https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Electronics-Forrest-M...

Intermediate (with a heavy RF slant): http://www.arrl.org/arrl-handbook-2015

Advanced: https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp...

And then there are the various subcategories: low level precision analog, high power motors and switchgear, basic digital and microcontrollers, high speed processors, etc... you're asking a wide open question.

Even Manufacturing is not a simple question to answer unless given some direction. You want to make a first PC board in your bathroom, or build complex electromechanical assemblies?

⬐ zyngaro

Great ressources thank you.

⬐ zyngaro

Thank you. To narrow down the scope. Something like the raspberry pi is what I have in mind. I want to lear for example how to read and understand a hardware board design.

⬐ asfarley

There's some demand for niche accessory boards for the RPi. Relatively easy to design, too - get a basic copy of Eagle or KiCAD.

I don't know if any single tutorial is going to give you what you want. I'd just dive right in, figure out what you want to do with your board, select some parts at Digikey, and start designing. Google questions as they come up.

I highly recommend that book as well, I learned more about signal integrity from reading it twice than I did during all of EE undergrad.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/...

⬐ mud_dauber

My company designs & sells high-perf memories. My lead AE has a copy of this within reach of his desk.

http://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-ll-003-build-a-small-radar-...

http://www.amazon.com/Short-Range-Practical-Approaches-Elect...

http://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/...

That book looks great, thanks! I've been reading:

High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic by Johnson and Graham:

http://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/...

and RTL Hardware Design using VHDL by Chu:

http://www.amazon.com/RTL-Hardware-Design-Using-VHDL/dp/0471...

(the latter for designing for FPGAs)

Unfortunately I learned EE as an apprentice with no books but I've heard High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic [1] is good.

Understanding why high speed is more like RF and analog electronics has a lot to do with impedance, which is the "resistance" of a material to a change in current at a specific frequency. Ohm's law is impedance at 0hz (DC current) but it gets a lot more complicated when you have a 133 Mhz bus because now the signal is changing fast enough that a lot of interesting effects start to pop up. For example, the capacitance of the PCB has a significant effect on rise times, your trace lengths have to be within 1/20th of the wavelength of the signal of each other or the bits might arrive at different times, you have to start worrying about other Mhz+ noise from the power supply based solely on the location of traces (hence you have to place filter/bypass caps more carefully), you have to worry about mismatched impedances (the "resistance" @ 133 mhz is different between the trace and a pin or something) or else you'll have a lot of energy "reflected" back at the signal source, adding interference patterns, etc. You never really see any of this in hobbyist electronics unless you have a really long cable for Khz signals or are trying to use something like SPI at 100Mhz. Once you start dealing with high end ARM chips, DSPs, DDR2-3, PCI[e], gigabit ethernet, HDMI, these traces become very prevalent.

However the beauty of digital is that you don't really have to understand all of the analog that goes behind it. There are a lot of simple engineering rules that make it very difficult to mess up a high speed digital design (at least in my experience). If you have a tool like Altium, managing all the impedances, trace widths and lengths, differential pairs becomes a cake walk. If you know what an error looks like in an oscilloscope (whether its a rise time problem, reflection problem, etc) then you'll find it easy to work in the field. Then there's actual RF engineering, which is a whole other story (digital signals are rarely more than the mW range, RF engineering also goes beyond that into W-KW-MW range).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/...

⬐ zhemao

It seems like apprenticeship is really the only way to learn this. They don't even teach this stuff in undergrad EE programs.

⬐ akiselev

I find that hard to believe because I can't imagine teaching EE beyond the first year without running face first into impedance. I mean, any time you touch on RF (which is the really interesting part of analog anyway) you have to somehow talk about the difference between DC and AC, unless you talk about it in an exclusively academic way as if it's some EE relic that you'll never use. It might come down to the fact that everyone is taught Ohm's Law first, which for me seems a terrible way to teach EE because it forces an immutable, instantaneous relationship for your circuit (aka spooky action at a distance) whereas impedance has a meaning grounded in how the electrons interact with matter. I threw away everything I learned in EE/ohm's law when my mentor taught me impedance because the mathematics, units, and physical intuition finally fell into place.

The benefit of an apprenticeship is that you are usually taught in a project setting with tools that have this knowledge largely built in. All you have to know is the theoretical implications of each of your use cases (and there aren't many in say, consumer smartphone design, except for the antenna) and what the jargon is for your software. Altium has "matched lengths," "interactive differential pair routing," "impedance matching," etc. which you can use with specific engineering calculators ( http://www.mantaro.com/resources/impedance_calculator.htm is my favorite) and the software will do the rest. Literally, point, click, and drag.

⬐ zhemao

I should probably clarify. What I meant to say is that they don't really teach high-frequency analog design in school. We covered the theoretical aspects, like impedance matching and reflection, but there's a long way between knowing those things and being able to reason with them when designing a chip.

⬐ akiselev

Well if you understood the fundamentals it's actually not that far to being able to design a board. Designing a chip is a whole other matter but can also be quite easy if you are comfortable with FPGAs and using IP cores. I'd say there's about a 0% chance of you having your own fab so the ASIC firm you hire will usually help you synthesize the high level language design to silicon (for a price).

Once you're comfortable with your routing tool, check out the following links. This is the material I use as a refresher when jumping back into high speed digital design:

http://www.ti.com/lit/an/scaa082/scaa082.pdf <-- Check out page 7, has a great diagram for what happens with reflections

http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/app_note/AN2536.pdf

http://www.altera.com/literature/hb/stx2/stx2_sii52012.pdf

⬐ zhemao

I should mention that I'm a computer engineering major and not a EE major, so I haven't taken some of the more advanced physics classes like solid state physics or electromagnetics. Are there any resources you would recommend for getting more of the theoretical background on those topics?

⬐ akiselev

I've tried to learn the physics behind EE but my brain has been shot too many times by primary through secondary education. As a CS major you can dive in depth into the PCI/DDR standards and they will teach you alot about the signals. Combine it with a application note on DDR routing and you'll get the big picture.