Get the eye on communications test

Digital Communications Test and Measurement: High-Speed Physical Layer Characterization. Dennis Derickson and Marcus Müller, eds. Prentice Hall Semiconductor Design Series, Pearson Education (www.prenhallprofessional.com), 2007. 935 pages. $99.

The chapters in this book cover important topics such as jitter, eye diagrams, clock recovery, bit-error-rate (BER) testing, and stress testing for both electrical and optical communications links. Unfortunately, the editors push the importance of jitter (chapter 2) to the point where they cover the topic before covering the basics of communications systems in chapter 3; I think they should have reversed the order of these chapters.

Aside from that, this book just about covers it all. I found chapter 4, “Bit Error Ratio Testing,” particularly useful. It provides just enough depth to cover the topic without delving into the underlying statistics.

Because each chapter is written by a different author, you'll get some redundancy—jitter and BER appear in several chapters. For example, in addition to the coverage of jitter in chapter 2, chapters 6 and 7 describe techniques for measuring jitter with real-time oscilloscopes and sampling oscilloscopes. Digital Communications Test and Measurement isn't just about jitter and BER, though. It also covers the time domain and the frequency domain and provides information about time-domain reflectometry and S-parameters.

If you need in-depth knowledge about any of the topics in this book, you can find books dedicated to each. But if you need an introduction to the practical measurements you need to make, this book is for you.

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