Book links test and signal integrity
A Signal Integrity Engineer's Companion: Real-Time Test and Measurement and Design Simulation, by Geoff Lawday, David Ireland, and Greg Edlund. Prentice Hall Pearson Education (www.prenhallprofessional.com), 2008. 460 pages. $85.50.
By Martin Rowe, Senior Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 11/1/2008 2:00:00 AM
Signal integrity has become synonymous with high-speed serial data links, and this book strengthens the “link” between the two. In truth, the book's subtitle is more descriptive of its contents than the main title, because the bulk of the text covers test equipment, test processes, and physical-layer standards compliance.
From reading this book, you'll learn which type of test to perform on signal paths and what test equipment you'll need. This book covers oscilloscopes (both real-time and sampling), logic analyzers, probes, and signal sources that you can use to characterize a transmission channel and compare your results to simulations. The authors dedicate an entire chapter to probes—an essential part of any measurement. In fact, the book covers probes before covering oscilloscopes and logic analyzers.
The authors dedicate two chapters to case studies: one discusses the chip-to-chip communications used in DDR2, and the other discusses using PCI Express for communications between a host board and a peripheral. In both cases, the authors take you on a journey to complete a table where you verify whether a simulation has sufficient design margins. The DDR2 case study takes you through a timing analysis. You determine if a design has enough timing margin to guarantee that a system will properly read and write data to and from memory. The PCI Express exercise builds upon chapters that cover transmitter and receiver testing and asks you to complete a table on jitter analysis and signal loss. The case studies cover printed-circuit board traces, vias, and connectors and how they contribute to timing and amplitude problems.
You will find some fundamental information about signal integrity in this book, but not an in-depth theory of signals, jitter, and bit-error rate, which are so tightly associated with signal integrity. In fact, the authors barely mention the different types of jitter that often appear in serial data streams. You will, though, learn about setup-and-hold issues, rise and fall timing, and circuit modeling.
This book follows a trend of using black-and-white images only in print, which doesn't work when you try to look at screen images of timing and eye diagrams. The text refers to image colors that you can't see on the printed page—to see the color, you need to buy an electronic copy of the book.
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