"High-Speed Digital System Design: A Handbook of Interconnect Theory and Design Practices" by S.H. Hall, G.W. Hall, and J.A. McCall is a cutting-edge guide to the theory and practice of high-speed digital system design. An understanding of high-speed digital interconnects is essential for designers dealing with the challenges of ever-increasing operating speeds of today's microprocessors. This book provides a practical guide to the state of the art of modern digital system design, combining easily accessible explanations with immensely useful problem-solving strategies. "High-Speed Digital System Design" is aimed at clarifying difficult and often neglected topics involving the effects of high frequencies on digital buses and presenting a variety of proven techniques and application examples.
Without intending to appear overly heretical, this book could be considered a worthy successor to "High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic" [Howard Johnson & Graham Martin; Prentice Hall; 1e; ISBN: 0133957241] written in 1993. This book is the most comprehensive book I have seen in the area of system bus design. It focuses largely on signal integrity issues that must be solved in modern high-speed designs. It includes much practical information that can be directly applied to design, as well as a sufficient amount of theory so that the reader can understand the fundamental issues associated with high-speed signal propagation. It also covers topics not included in other texts, such as high-speed measurement techniques, design methodology, and EMI. It is highly understandable and well organized. Chapter of the book are:
Chapter 1 "The Importance of Interconnect Design" by Garrett Hall introduces the importance of the book.
Forming the basis of much of the material presented in later chapters, Chapter 2 "Ideal Transmission Line Fundamentals" by Stephen Hall describes basic transmission line theory and terminology with specific digital focus.
Chapter 3 "Crosstalk" and Chapter 4 "Nonideal Interconnect Issues" by Stephen Hall introduce crosstalk effects, explain their relevance to digital timings, and explore nonideal transmission line effects.
Chapter 5 "Connectors, Packages, and Vias" by Stephen Hall explains the impact of chip packages, vias, connectors, many other aspects that affect the performance of digital systems.
Chapter 6 "Nonideal Return Paths, Simultaneous Switching Noise, and Power Delivery" by Stephen Hall explains elusive effects such as simultaneous switching noise and nonideal current return path distortions that can devastate a digital design, if not properly considered.
Chapter 7 "Buffer Modeling" by Garrett Hall discusses different methods that can be used to model the output buffers that are used to drive digital signals onto a bus.
Chapter 8 "Digital Timing Analysis" by Stephen Hall explains in detail several methods of system level digital timing. It describes the theory behind different timing scheme and relates them to the high speed digital effects described in the book.
Chapter 9 "Design Methodologies" by Stephen Hall addresses handling the very large number of variables affecting a system and reducing them to make the problem tractable.
Chapter 10 "Radiated Emissions Compliance and System Noise Minimization" by Garrett Hall covers radiated emissions. Radiated emissions are usually addresses during prototyping when there is little time or money available to make changes.
Chapter 11 "High-Speed Measurement Techniques" by James McCall covers the practical aspects of making precision measurements in high speed digital systems.
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