DEPARTMENT FOR

CONTINUING EDUCATION

Why Johnny Cant Design a High-Speed Digital System

by Dr. Howard Johnson
This technical newsletter is by Dr Howard Johnson, author of "High-Speed Digital Design, a
Handbook of Black Magic" and "High-Speed Signal Propagation - Advanced Black Magic".

Dr Howard Johnson presents 3 courses based on the books above at the University of Oxford
each year:
High-Speed Digital Design
Advanced High-Speed Signal Propagation
High Speed Noise and Grounding

(reprinted with permission from Dr Howard Johnson and Signal Consulting, Inc., www.sigcon.com)

Welcome.
I've been asked to put together my thoughts on the state of education for digital engineers.
This is a good topic for me, as through my books, seminars, and my work at the University
of Oxford I contact literally thousands of designers every year. This experience has led me
to a certain understanding of their capabilities.
The first thing to realize is that digital design is becoming progressively more difficult.
I tried to capture that sense of difficulty with the artwork on this slide.
The difficulty comes in part because customers now expect more from their systems, in
terms of power, reliability, low cost, EMC, wireless operation, speed and better user
interfaces.

www.conted.ox.ac.uk/electronics

The difficulty is compounded by the fact that, as a class, digital engineers are less well
equipped to face the problems encountered in high-speed design than they were 30 years
ago.

"Shannon's Communication Theory has Descended to the Backplane"

Figure courtesy of Accelerant Networks

In the distant past, prospective students of computer architecture all took a common
electrical engineering curriculum. This standard curriculum included basic analog circuits,
transmission lines, and linear systems theory three crucial subjects required to
understand how high-speed digital hardware really works.
At the time, such an education seemed like overkill. The computer hardware of that early
era was so slooowwww that few people needed to know much about analog circuitry to
make their systems function.
For example, a typical LS-TTL logic gate has a rise/fall time of about 20 nanoseconds. By
today's standard, that is very slow. It doesn't take an analog guru to plug together a lot of
LS-TTL logic.
As a result, college and university administrators have begun to feel they can safely drop
the old analog curriculum in favor of newer, more modern computer science classes.
There are even those who suggest that analog design is no longer relevant.
I don't hold anything against the field of computer science. It's a wonderful discipline.
Without it we wouldn't have the CPU sophistication we have today, or nearly as many
people trained to work with complex computer architectures.

"Analog Design is not Obsolete"

US Army Photos, http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/comphist/

www.conted.ox.ac.uk/electronics

I don't blame our colleges and universities, either, for the decisions they have made. A
modern university has a lot on its plate. Information overload is a terrible problem. There
are too many subjects to teach, and too few hours available in which to teach them. I
understand that.
The result, though, has been near disaster for many high-speed design projects. In the
1970s, only a few guys at Cray, IBM and Amdahl needed to understand signal
propagation.
Today, all of us need the same level of understanding.
Dropping analog circuits from computer-science curriculum will prove a costly mistake.
I'm going to illustrate the importance of analog circuit concepts with three examples
showing how inadequate education gets in the way of good high-speed design.
First, look at any digital schematic. Consider the logic nets that carry digital signals from
gate to gate. Basic circuit theory teaches that logic signals are propagated by the flow of
current, specifically by the movement of electrons, and that these currents always flow in
loops.

"Digital engineers don't believe current flows in loops"

A digital schematic shows no ground connections, reinforcing the idea that "signal current"
doesn't require a return path
One property of electron flow is that the electrons don't stack up anywhere. They don't just
flow into the receiver and pile up in a bit bucket. The intense electric fields generated by
each electron prevent that from happening. Whatever current goes out must come back,
and the path for returning signal current is equally as important as the path for outbound
signal current.
On the schematic, however, the paths for returning signal currents are not even shown.
Many digital engineers therefore assume that the return paths are irrelevant. After all, both
drivers and receivers are specified as voltage-mode devices, so why worry about the
current?
This great misconception is reinforced by manufacturers of oscilloscopes and logic
analyzers who primarily market voltage-mode probes. If we had good current-sensing
probes with a pinpoint proximity sensor small enough to see the current flowing on an
individual BGA ball, the flow of current would suddenly become a "reality" for many
engineers rather than a merely theoretical concept.
www.conted.ox.ac.uk/electronics

A misunderstanding of the need for a good return-current path results in two very common
system flaws: high-speed buses that flow across slots and gaps in digital ground planes,
thereby picking up inordinate amounts of crosstalk, and connectors with inadequate
numbers of ground pins.

"Digital engineers don't believe in the H-field"

I attribute the lack of understanding of magnetic fields to our educational system, with its
disproportionate focus on electric field behavior.
This belief is a relic of the tube era, which was characterized by very high-impedance
circuits. For example, the plate circuit of a tube might have an impedance of 100,000
ohms, much higher than the impedance of free space (377 ohms). Such a circuit involves
HUGE voltages and tiny currents. Therefore, near-field energy surrounding a tube exists
predominantly in the electric field mode, and most crosstalk problems involve electric-field,
or capacitive, coupling.
Today's high-speed digital systems use low-impedance circuits, near fifty ohms, much
lower than the impedance of free space. These circuits use tiny voltages, but HUGE
currents. Therefore, the near-field energy surrounding a digital circuit exists mostly in the
magnetic-field mode, not electric. Most crosstalk, ground bounce, and interference
problems in high-speed digital systems involve loops of current, magnetic fields, and
inductance.
In the world of EMC, it is common knowledge that the near-field energy surrounding a
digital board is mostly magnetic. Digital people don't know about that. Digital folks waste
inordinate amounts of time trying to construct electric-field shielding for their circuits when
what they need is magnetic-field shielding.

www.conted.ox.ac.uk/electronics

"Digital engineers don't believe logic gates are differential amplifiers"

On a typical product datasheet the input voltage sensitivity is rated in units of absolute
volts. It is not clearly stated that the gate responds only to the difference between the
voltages on its input pin and its designated reference pin. Nor are we clear about which is
the designated reference pin. (For TTL it's usually the most negative power rail; for ECL
it's the most positive, but this rule doesn t always work.)
This ambiguity in the designation of the signal reference leads many engineers to think
that a gate can sense "absolute zero" volts, as if it had a magic wire leading out of the chip
to the center of the earth that could pick up a "true" ground reference potential. As a
consequence, they fail to comprehend the difficulties that arise when the reference
voltages at two points in a system are unequal.
No vendor wants to admit that all their chips are susceptible to ground shifts, so we can't
expect them to talk about it on their data sheets. On the other hand, we all need to
remember that large ground shifts between chips are likely to cause malfunctions.
Most digital designers have spent little time thinking about the existence of different ground
potentials in their systems, or the mechanisms that create ground shifts.
So, if our engineers are lacking key bits of knowledge, what do we do? Nobody can
change our educational structure overnight.

"A Model Program"

I don't have a complete answer, but I can tell you briefly about one model program that has
been recently established in the U.K. at the University of Oxford. I've been teaching my
two-day seminar format there for about ten years, where it has become the most popular
engineering short-course in the history of their continuing education program.
We have recently expanded the high-speed digital engineering program, bringing together
four top experts in the field. Each delivers a two-day short course focusing on their
particular speciality. These courses are designed for people in industry who, for whatever
reason, decide they need a better understanding of high-speed effects. Tuition for the vast
majority of students is paid by their employers.
The courses are advertised through mass mailings, magazine editorials, emails to former
students, and the University web site. This past year, in a terrible economy, the series
brought in a total of 156 students.
www.conted.ox.ac.uk/electronics

In subsequent years I look forward to developing graduate-level research programs at the

University for students specializing in high-speed digital engineering. If there are any of
you in the audience, by the way, for whom that sort of program sounds appealing, please
let me know.
If the graduate program works, I'll drill down into the undergraduate curriculum to see what
changes we can make there to better equip digital designers for the work of the future.
Thanks for listening, and now I'll open the floor for discussion.

www.conted.ox.ac.uk/electronics

High-Speed Digital Engineering Month

Some of the world's leading digital engineering specialists come to the University of Oxford each year to
teach on our High-Speed Digital Engineering courses.

High-Speed Digital Design a two-day workshop in black magic (Dr Howard Johnson)
Learn about the important and timely issues involving high-speed digital design and signal integrity.
This course will give participants the power to instantly recognise and solve many of today's highspeed design problems.
Printed Circuit Board Design for Real-World EMI Control (Dr Bruce Archambeault)
The aim of this two-day seminar is to help working board design and layout engineers understand the
causes of EMC problems so this knowledge can be applied to real world product design immediately.
Electronic Product Design and Retrofit for EMC (Lee Hill)
This two day course provides a solid understanding of the problems encountered in designing and
troubleshooting for EMC for Digital, Analog and RF circuit design and EMC engineers
Advanced High-Speed Signal Propagation (Dr Howard Johnson)
This is an advanced-level course for experienced digital designers who want to press their designs to
the upper limits of speed and distance.
Advanced EMC: Fullwave Modelling for EMC and Signal Integrity (Dr Bruce Archambeault)
This course will examine the various full-wave simulation techniques, their strengths and their
weaknesses, and when they should be used for various signal integrity and EMC problems.
High Frequency Measurements (Doug Smith)
This course delivers practical knowledge for signal integrity design troubleshooting and verification
that can be used immediately on the job. The course material contains many unique design tips and
troubleshooting techniques.
Advanced Troubleshooting Techniques for Circuits and Systems (Doug Smith)
This course covers techniques applicable to design and verification of high-speed digital and
analogue circuits. Emphasis is on practical results and many of the concepts are demonstrated on
circuits.
Power Distribution Design (Istvan Novak)
This course provides an overview of good power distribution design practices. Good and bad
solutions are illustrated and put into the context of layout constraints, cost and performance so you
can apply the trade-offs and design solutions in your work.
Suspect Counterfeit Detection, Avoidance and Mitigation (Doug Smith)
In an interactive case study format, this course will review not only non-conformance related issues,
but also validation methods often overlooked in a Suspect Counterfeit Countermeasure Program.
EMC Lab Techniques for Designers (troubleshooting before you go to an EMC test site) (Doug Smith)
This course covers techniques for finding design issues that may cause EMC compliance problems
early in the design cycle, long before an official EMC test.
High-Speed Noise and Grounding (Dr Howard Johnson)
Led by Dr Howard Johnson, this course is for experienced digital designers who want to press their
designs to the upper limits of speed and distance. It is an advanced sequel to High-Speed Digital
Design and Advanced High-Speed Signal Propagation.
For further information please visit our website: www.conted.ox.ac.uk/highspeed
www.conted.ox.ac.uk/electronics

Dr Howard Johnson presents 3 courses at the University of Oxford each year:

1. High-Speed Digital Design
2. Advanced High-Speed Signal Propagation
3. High-Speed Noise and Grounding
Questions & Comments: all students who attend our High-Speed Digital Design courses have the
opportunity to talk directly with Dr. Johnson.

Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford

Rewley House, 1 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JA tel:+44 (0)1865 270360

www.conted.ox.ac.uk/electronics