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This March 20-22, EDI CON CHINA will take place at the China National Convention Center in Beijing, China. This year’s event brings its unique, high-quality technical conference with learning and training opportunities back to Beijing.

Nyquist frequency, first harmonic, clock frequency, fundamental frequency, and some other intimidating terms might be thrown at you by an SI engineer. Read on to get up to speed on these and other terms you need to know.

When I first started studying Maxwell’s Equations, I was always intrigued by its mathematical finesse. How could someone think of that? Today we take them for granted and we sometimes forget how amazing they are and what a genius the guy was. In my view, James Maxwell should be with, if not above, Einstein and Newton among the greatest physicists to ever live, but outside our field people seldom know who Maxwell was. 

No matter how well you understand the design principles, and no matter how much experience you have in designing boards, it’s easy for some problems to slip through the cracks because you just forgot to check that feature, or your design is just too big to manually check. This is where a design rule checker comes in.

The IEEE P370 standards group was formed over four years ago to draft a standard for the Electrical Characterization of PCB interconnects up to 50 GHz. On Monday, Jan 30, 2018, more than 30 engineers attended the organization’s first “plug fest” at the Santa Clara Convention Center to exercise some of the features of the proposed standard.

At DesignCon 2018, the IEEE P370 standards group announced the release of two important tools to assist all engineers for de-embedding. In the presentation by Jason Ellison and Heidi Barnes, “A NIST Traceable PCB Kit for Evaluating the Accuracy of De-Embedding Algorithms and Corresponding Metrics”, the two new tools were announced, a board kit and a de-embedding software tool.

Blando’s presentation illustrates the value of never accepting a result if it is not consistent with your engineering judgement. The determination of Blando’s team to resolve this simple problem benefits all of us to enable better differential pair measurements.

In our first electrical engineering class, we learn that the voltage across an inductor is L di/dt. We are ingrained with the idea that the voltage across an inductor is generated by the changing current through it. Not so, says Larry Smith, industry Power Integrity expert from Qualcomm and member of the SIJ EAB.

Now in its fourth generation, which sports data-transfer rates up to 16 Gb/s, Peripheral Component Interface Express standard (PCI Express, or PCIe) requires challenging physical-layer test requirements (Figure 1). We've covered electrical compliance test for PCIe 3.0 in some detail, but with the test specifications for PCIe 4.0 rounding into shape, it's time for a deep dive into electrical compliance test for this ubiquitous peripheral interface protocol.

I’ve been attending and presenting at DesignCon for 28 years since the first HP High Speed Digital Symposium. And every year, it’s been the same thing, overloaded with too many great talks, too many companies’ latest products to see and too many online friends to finally meet in person. The only thing that has changed is the “too many” part. Needless to say, the many part has only increased.