Digital Circuit Boards: Mach 1 GHz

1.1 Introduction

This book is written to provide the reader with the basic understanding that is needed to layout high speed digital circuit boards. The wiring and circuitry that interconnects components mounted on these boards has become a new field of engineering. This book treats the analog aspects of digital board design, as it relates to the hardware that is selected. The term analog applies to such topics such as rise and fall time, overshoot, transmission delay, reflections, radiation, settling time, cross talk, and energy flow. The term analog is often used to describe circuits that use a carrier signal, such as in cell phone communication. Much of the material in this book will apply to carrier signals, but the emphasis will be on digital circuit board layout. The methods described in this book work well for slower logic. These methods do not add to board cost. These methods do add to reliability and performance. Software design and selection of components that make up a logic design are not discussed.

Rather than gather a big list at the end of the book, I have placed a limited glossary at the end of each chapter. I feel that this glossary should contain the words that are most critical to an understanding of the material in the text. In an industry that is changing very rapidly, there are bound to be language problems. This is the case with the circuit board industry and digital logic. The definitions that are used must be as clear as possible or the reader will not ...