Artech House author Eric Bogatin has released our first-ever multimedia eBook, Bogatin’s Practical Guide to Transmission Line Design and Characterization for Signal Integrity Applications, and gave us insight with regard to the gap his book fills in the market today.
Transmission lines are traditionally taught in college and graduate school with a great deal of mathematical rigor. This often hides the underlying engineering principles so that design engineers are left with no insight into how a signal interacts with a transmission line and what their electrical properties really mean.
This book fills in this important gap between the fundamental engineering principles and the detailed math upon which these principles are based. Embedded videos in each chapter show in more detail exactly how to use these principles to solve real problems or how the tools are used to optimize a design or perform a measurement.
These fundamental principles are the basis upon which the professional level tools of 2D field solvers and TDR instruments are used to optimize the design of the transmission lines and characterize already fabricated transmission lines. Practical design and characterization techniques are introduced leveraging these tools.
- Never be intimidated again by the technical jargon associate with transmission lines, impedance, and reflections.
- Identify the important design features that most affect the characteristic impedance or differential impedance of transmission lines.
- Use a 2D field solver to optimize a circuit board stack-up design and make the cost-performance tradeoffs
- Interpret TDR measurements to identify what might be artifacts and what is a real feature
- Interpret differential TDR measurements to extract the differential impedance of interconnects
- Extract a high bandwidth model of an interconnect from TDR measurements by matching parameter values of a simulation to the measurement.
This book offers seven important features that differentiate it from any other book out there:
- Each chapter contains a few short relevant videos that show practical applications of the principles, the simulation tools or the measurements tools and how to used these to solve actual design or characterization problems.
- The engineering principles are presented with an emphasis on understanding, not hidden by the math.
- The design of transmission lines is illustrated using rules of thumb, approximations and 2D field solvers. The details of how to use 2D field solvers to explore design space and gain insight into how physical design influences design is clearly presented.
- The principles behind the TDR instrument is presented without a lot of math and with many examples of both simulations and measurements of real interconnect structures to illustrate how to interpret the measurements.
- The properties of differential pairs are introduced in a simple way to highlight how the coupling between traces affects the odd mode impedance and the differential impedance. Simulation tools are used to show how differential pairs can be designed and how a differential TDR measures the properties of differential pairs.
- A free, open source animation tool is provided for download to illustrate how signals dynamically propagate on transmission lines and reflect from impedance changes.
- A free, open source simulation tool is provided with many completed circuit files which can be downloaded along with measurements, which can be used to simulate the TDR response of transmission line circuits and discontinuities.
