I have good news for you: The popular textbook, Signal Integrity Characterization Techniques, by Mike Resso and Eric Bogatin, is now available in a second edition. 

It’s hard to find books that introduce practical TDR and VNA measurements. One great source of information is application notes, and Keysight, formerly Agilent, formerly HP, the pioneer in pushing the art in TDR and VNA instruments, has an extensive library of them.

In their book, Resso and Bogatin pull together 23 app notes and DesignCon papers they’ve written covering time domain and frequency domain measurement techniques and analysis methods. 

The first section has their top four app notes on TDR/TDT measurement methods, 4-port TDR and VNA measurements differential pair design, and data mining 12-port VNA measurements. This is a great starting places to understand not just how to do these measurements but how to interpret the results. Each S-parameter term tells a different piece of the complete story about an interconnect. These app notes tell their tales.

This second edition includes a new app note by Keysight veteran expert, Robert Schafer, on accuracies of time and frequency measurement techniques. As he has shown often at DesignCon presentations, Shafer is meticulous in his analysis of the limitations of time domain measurements compared to frequency domain. He demonstrates the limitations on the S-parameter measurements of interconnects from the lower signal to noise ratio and the larger jitter in time domain measurements compared to frequency domain measurements. When metrology grade measurements are needed, there is no substitute for VNA measurements.

The foundations of measurement techniques and the analysis of the measurement results are established in the first section of the book. The remaining five sections are composed of other app notes by the authors and reprints of DesignCon papers that focus on measurements.  These cover topics such as backplanes, probing and de-embedding, jitter, dielectric material and circuit board structure measurements, and 28 Gbps channel analysis and design.

If your work involves TDR or VNA methods, this is an important book for your library. It clearly shows how these measurements are the foundation of analysis and design for all high-performance interconnects.

As Resso and Bogatin say, “The second edition of this book is even better than the first. Updated graphics, new topics of interest and novel signal integrity applications for 400G make this a must read for anyone designing internet infrastructure physical layer components and systems.”

Now, I have even better news: it’s available as a free download from Keysight. Visit : www.keysight.com/find/RessoBook and request your pdf copy of this valuable textbook.