Reddit Reddit reviews High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic

We found 31 Reddit comments about High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic
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31 Reddit comments about High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic:

u/Hakawatha · 27 pointsr/electronics

That's because it is RF design. Have you read the handbook of black magic? Excellent book, I'm told.

u/ReasonableDrunk · 14 pointsr/marvelstudios

The definitive work on high speed digital electrical engineering is, in fact, called the Handbook of Black Magic.

https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/0133957241

u/Authenticity3 · 10 pointsr/ECE

Old (1993) but classic fundamentals that are still relevant today:
High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic https://www.amazon.com/dp/0133957241/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_O05TBb9HPRG90

u/greenlambda · 9 pointsr/ECE

I'm mostly self-taught, so I've learned to lean heavily on App Notes, simulations, and experience, but I also like these books:
The Howard Johnson Books:
High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0133957241/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_I0Iwyb99K9XCV
High Speed Signal Propagation: Advanced Black Magic
https://www.amazon.com/dp/013084408X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_c3IwybKSBFYVA

Signal and Power Integrity - Simplified (2nd Edition)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0132349795/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_J3IwybAAG9BWV

Also, another thing that can be overlooked is PCB manufacturability. It's vitally important to understand exactly what can and can't be manufactured so that you can make design trade offs, and in order to do that you need to know how they are made. As a fairly accurate intro, I like the Eurocircuits videos:
http://www.eurocircuits.com/making-a-pcb-pcb-manufacture-step-by-step

u/Beagles_are_da_best · 9 pointsr/PrintedCircuitBoard

I did learn all of this stuff from experience. Honestly, I had a little bit of a tough time right out of college because I didn't have much practical circuit design experience. I now feel like I have a very good foundation for that and it came through experience, learning from my peers, and lots of research. I have no affiliation with Henry Ott, but I treat his book like a bible . I refer to it just about every time I do a board design. Why? because it's packed with this type of practical information. Here's his book. I bought mine used as cheap as I could. At my previous job, they just had one in the library. Either way, it was good to have around.

So why should you care about electromagnetic compatibility (EMC)? A couple reasons:

  1. EMC compliance is often regulated by industry and because a product requirement. The types of tests that your product has to pass is dependent on the industry typically, but in general there are tests where bad things are injected into your board and tests where they measure how noisy your board. You have to pass both.
  2. EMC compliance, in my opinion, is very well correlated with the reliability and quality of a product. If a product is destroyed "randomly" or stops working when the microwave is on, you're not likely to have a good opinion of that product. Following guidelines like the one I did above is the path to avoiding problems like that.
  3. EMC design is usually not taught in schools and yet it is the most important part of the design (besides making it perform the required product function in the first place). It also is very hard to understand because many of the techniques for improving your design do not necessarily show up on your schematics. Often, it's about how well your layout your board, how the mechanical design for the enclosure of your board is considered, etc.

    Anyways, it's definitely worth looking at and is a huge asset if you can follow those guidelines. Be prepared to enter the workforce and see rampant disregard for EMC best practices as well as rampant EMC problems in existing products. This is common because, as I said, it's not taught and engineers often don't know what tools to use to fix it. It often leads to expensive solutions where a few extra caps and a better layout would have sufficed.

    A couple more books I personally like and use:

    Howard Johnson, High Speed Digital Design (it's from 1993, but still works well)

    Horowitz and Hill, The Art of Electronics (good for understanding just about anything, good for finding tricks and ideas to help you for problems you haven't solved before but someone probably has)

    Last thing since I'm sitting here typing anyways:

    When I first got out of college, I really didn't trust myself even when I had done extensive research on a particular part of design. I was surrounded by engineers who also didn't have the experience or knowledge to say whether I was on the right path or not. It's important to use whatever resources you have to gain experience, even if those resources are books alone. It's unlikely that you will be lucky and get a job working with the world's best EE who will teach you everything you need to know. When I moved on from my first job after college, I found out that I was on the right path on many things thanks to my research and hard work. This was in opposition to my thinking before then as my colleagues at my first job were never confident in our own ability to "do EE the right way" - as in, the way that engineers at storied, big companies like Texas Instruments and Google had done. Hope that anecdotal story pushes you to keep going and learning more!
u/dbuckley · 8 pointsr/technology

> Why does it transmit anything at all

Electronics that have fast switching transitions generate significant amounts of radio frequency energy. In the modern world, it is a major part of the designers job to reduce or shield these emissions so that equipment doesn't interfere with other equipment.

There is a lot of skill and art and not a little black magic involved in getting high speed electronics to work at all. In fact, one of the first books to seriously tackle the subject, a book that many designer still has on their bookshelf is High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic. The challenge once it works is to make it less like a transmitter.

To prove the thing is compliant with the standards of where the thing is being sold, it is traditional to take the kit to an EMC test house, where the Device Under test (the DUT) is placed in a screened room, and set up in representative conditions (ie power cables, Ethernet cables etc), and the amount of radio frequency junk spewed into the air is measured. This costs money, according to here, about $1-10K. if you fail, you have to fix the design, and spend money for testing again, until it passes. And of course, fixing the design takes time.

Many countries are happy to sell kit across international boundaries with none of this stuff done at all.

u/fatangaboo · 7 pointsr/ECE

For your job? Spend the money or get your boss to spend the money on the books written by Howard Johnson.

(book 1)

(book 2)

Trivialized and unsatisfying answer to the question in the title of this thread: Vbounce = Lground * dI/dt . You think Lground equals zero but you are mistaken.

u/hwillis · 6 pointsr/electronics

Can't use free eagle (too big) for this, but kicad or probably other things would work. With a few good books you can lay out a big board without advanced tools, although it can take longer. With cheap/free tools you'll usually have to use some finicky or kludgy methods to do really complex routing (blind/buried vias, free vias, heat transfer, trace length), but that usually isn't too big a deal. Here's a timelapse of a guy using Altium to route a high speed, large (a bit smaller than op's) data board for a high speed camera. The description has rough steps with timestamps- 38 hours total to lay out.

u/PubliusPontifex · 5 pointsr/PrintedCircuitBoard

Think you're looking for this: http://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/0133957241

Main things to keep in mind (well there are a lot), are trace-length and matching (for pairs/busses), keeping your capacitance either low, or predictable, watch your reflections (unless you're doing pci, in which case the whole damn bus is reflections).

You'll almost certainly be doing lvds or something similar (unless it's dram in which case god save you), so the key is always trace length matching and try to keep them together. You also have to watch your lower layer, hopefully you can have a decent ground plane to work with, but a broken ground plane can be a problem.

LVDS helps, but otherwise emi is a b.

All this being said imho analog is a lot harder. Digital is about knowing what not to do (and there isn't that much), analog is knowing exactly what to do because everything matters.

u/[deleted] · 5 pointsr/electronics

No problem, glad it was helpful! This book seems like what you're looking for, but it's a bit pricey. Right the First Time is another great resource, and volume 1 is available as a free .pdf online somewhere (and some HDI and flex circuit books, but that's a bit less relevant. Got them all at the same site when I downloaded them).

u/doodle77 · 3 pointsr/electronics

this book.

OP's board is clearly not high speed so it doesn't matter.

u/erasmus42 · 3 pointsr/rfelectronics
u/Skipper_Jos · 3 pointsr/engineering

I will also recommended 'High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic book' , it definitely has some good stuff!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0133957241/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_O05TBb9HPRG90#

u/dietfig · 3 pointsr/electronics

High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic is supposed to be a great book on the subject but the frequencies you're working at don't really qualify as anything approaching "high speed". I really don't think you'll have any issues. The wavelength at 100 kHz is 3 kilometers so you're nowhere near having to worry about transmission line effects.

Make sure to adequately decouple every power pin at the chip to deal with the switching transients from the FETs otherwise you'll see a lot of ripple on your supply lines which can cause problems. ADI generally uses a 1 uF and 100 nF capacitor in parallel (IIRC) in their application circuits and I tend to think they know what they're doing.

Is your copper pour grounded? I wouldn't be very worried about coupling noise into your logic traces because 400 Hz is such a low frequency but I suppose it's possible.

ADI publishes a guide called "PCB Board Layout and Design Techniques" that goes through things like proper grounding but I didn't have any luck trying to find it on Google. The Circuit Designer's Companion is an excellent book that also covers the same material with a lot more depth.

u/Wil_Code_For_Bitcoin · 3 pointsr/PrintedCircuitBoard

Not entirely sure what you're looking for but I've heard a lot of praises for this book : https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/0133957241

u/velocicar · 2 pointsr/EngineeringStudents

Here's a book I use at work.

u/dangerbirds · 2 pointsr/ECE

Highspeed Digital Design by Graham and Johnson is more focused on high speed digital signals, but most of it applies to low speed as well. It has a ton of good "engineering rules of thumb" when it comes to doing PCB design.

u/m85476585 · 2 pointsr/AskEngineers

I literally have a book called "A Handbook of Black Magic". It's a little old, but it's still one of the best books on the subject.

u/tweakingforjesus · 2 pointsr/electronics

In addition to the per-IC decoupling cap already mentioned, I'd add a large electrolytic across VCC and GND near the connector on the right. You also might want to beef up the power and ground traces to reduce resistance to the individual ICs. Remember that your high-speed signal traces are going to induce the opposite current in parallel traces. A ground plane will help with this effect.

If you are really interested in digital PCB design, you might check out this book.

u/PlatinumX · 2 pointsr/AskElectronics

> Where did you take the formula for wire impedance from? Where could I read more about it?

This is a classic parallel conductor transmission line, there are calculators online. As I mentioned before, the twists do not affect impedance.

You can read more about transmission lines, characteristic impedance, twisted pair, and signal integrity all over the web (and of course check Wikipedia). These are very large topics with a lot of details to learn.

If you want a book, I recommend High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic.

u/drtwist · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

Eric Bogatin's book "Signal Integrity - Simplified" Howard Johnson's High Speed Digital Design and Mike Peng Li's Jitter, Noise, and Signal Integrity at High-Speed are all fantastic reads if you are looking for dead tree material. if you have a Safari subscription you can read Bogatin's and Li's books for "free"

u/jayknow05 · 2 pointsr/AskElectronics

This is a good book on the subject. I would personally work with a 4-layer board with a GND and VCC layer. It sounds like you already have a bunch of layers as it is so yes I would recommend a VCC layer.

u/frankenbeans · 2 pointsr/ECE

Amazing? These look like they were swiped from an overview lecture, there isn't any really good explanation in here. If this is all new to you they might be a good starting point for learning some basic concepts and vocabulary of signal integrity.

Johnson's Black Magic book is the general reference for this. There are many other (well written) white papers out there. Ott and Bogatin have good books as well.

u/reddit_user33 · 1 pointr/Electrical_Engineers

Different applications require different rules to abide by to a certain extent.

High speed digital design - Howard Johnson has given me such a great insight to the world of high speed electronics.

u/kevlarcoated · 1 pointr/PrintedCircuitBoard

The books referenced by the most presenters and PCB design conferences are
Right the first time by Lee Ritchie http://www.thehighspeeddesignbook.com/
Highspeed design: A handbook of Black Magic - Howard Johnson https://www.amazon.ca/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/0133957241

Note that A handbook of black magic reads like a text book, it is very long and very boring.
The subject of PCB is complicated and requires an in depth understanding of the physics because just knowing the rules isn't enough convince other engineers that it's the right way to do something. More importantly, in my experience PCB design is always the least bad solution, you have to understand when you can break the rules and what the implications will be and understand if the trade off is acceptable

u/Beggar876 · 1 pointr/AskElectronics

Find/download/buy this book: High speed Digital Design: A handbook of Black Magic - Howard Johnson https://www.amazon.ca/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/0133957241

​

Scan it cover to cover. It will pay for itself the first time you save a pcb re-spin because of something you saw in it. It has for me.

u/somekindofdevil · 1 pointr/AskElectronics

Almost every PCB/EDA software doing length matching automatically so you don't need to worry about that. If you wanna know how softwares are doing it, It's more like a mathematical problem. I think they are using parametric curves like Bezier. You can calculate length of a bezier curve easily so you can match them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9zier_curve

If you wanna know more about high speed pcb design, I recommend this book.
https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/0133957241

u/VectorPotential · 1 pointr/AskElectronics

What are you trying to measure? Your pulse rise time will do some funny things to your results if you're not careful.

If you can obtain a copy of High Speed Digital Design, the author describes several test jigs for such tests.

u/squaganaga · 1 pointr/ECE

I haven't yet designed boards with EMC and RF in mind. I've seen recommendations for the high-speed digital design books thrown around, though.