News and New Products

Book strives to make you “one” with your waveforms

By Bill Schweber -- EDN, 4/29/2004

Anytime you have “integrity” and “simplified” in the same sentence, you’ve got my attention, and Signal Integrity—Simplified by industry veteran and EDN contributor Eric Bogatin is worth yours. This excellent, clear, and readable book (ISBN 0-13-066946-6) examines and explains all aspects of pc-board design and layout with the goal of helping you get it right the first time.

The $89, 608-pg book assumes only a basic electrical engineering background and uses equations as necessary but not to excess. Instead, the author concentrates on an advancing your analysis in stages, beginning with rough rules of thumb, stepping up to analytical approximation, and finishing with numerical simulation. The book is easy to look through, clearly calling out a list of basic principles and also highlighting tips—about one per page—that you should keep in mind after you’ve read through the section. The author discusses signal integrity, starting with basic passive components, such as resistors or pc-board traces and then expands to the effect that associated or adjacent factors have.

Bogatin wants to make you feel the pain and buffeting that a signal traveling through a pc-board trace senses, which the time- and distance-varying impedance the signal sees along the line influences. Your challenge is to understand the underlying causes of these impedance changes. This book quickly repays you for the time and money you spend on it.

Prentice Hall, http://vig.prenhall.com.