Eric Bogatin

About 150 years ago the first stable transatlantic cable was laid and messages were sent between Ireland and Newfound­land over copper. The data rate on this cable was not even 1 bit/sec, it was 0.1 bit/sec. Concerns over the cable reliabil­ity and the slow data rate led some to believe copper was doomed as a communication media for these long cables.

If you’ve just started on the path of designing high-speed serial links or have designed dozens of your own, Don Telian’s Signal Integrity in Practice is the book that will accelerate your engineering judgment and possibly save you from multiple design spins. Eric Bogatin takes a closer look at what he considers a must-have book for new and experienced engineers.

Who doesn’t love an easy-to-use 2D field solver to calculate the single-ended or differential impedance of PCB transmission lines? Eric Bogatin takes this one from Sierra Circuits for a test drive.

With the recent introduction of the Averatek Semi-Additive Process (A-SAP) process, linewidths under 1 mil are possible using the same fabrication processing line as for traditional 4 mil wide lines. This opens up the possibility of using narrower traces in the BGA escape region than in long-path routing regions. However, using this routing architecture means the narrower traces in the BGA escape field are at a higher impedance than the wider, 50 ohm traces in the routing region. So, how long can these traces be before the impedance mismatch is a problem? The authors of this piece propose an analysis methodology to find out.

Impedance is the most fundamental and important electrical property of any component. With a very simple technique, anyone can simulate the impedance of any circuit in seconds using any version of SPICE, for free. Read on to learn more.

Now that I am teaching full time and have a number of undergraduate and graduate students doing weekly project reviews, I listen to more presentations than I give. I find myself giving the same feedback over and over again. So, I thought I would share my eight most common comments and tips to engineers giving presentations.

Poorly designed interconnects can contribute to near field emissions, which is sometimes an indication of EMI failures, read on to see how to avoid failing an FCC test.

In the January 2021 print issue and the April 2021 online issue of the Signal Integrity Journal, I wrote an editorial in which I threw down a gauntlet to tool vendors to offer low cost or free versions of their tools to help engineers accelerate up the learning curve. Ansys picked up that gauntlet and now offers a free version of their industry standard electromagnetic simulator suite, Electronics Desktop. 

Fans of a single, multifunction instrument that replaces a dozen benchtop instruments will be excited with the release from Liquid Instruments. Here’s a closer look at this multi-function instrument that combines the features of a bench top full of instruments, like a scope, a DMM, a function generator, a frequency response analyzer, a spectrum analyzer, and even an impedance analyzer, all into one USB controlled instrument. 

Eric Bogatin has a little fun with engineering in this tongue-in-cheek celebration of EE jargon; don’t forget your flux capacitor!