High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic

Great book. BTW, the author lists a LOT of errata on his website, enough to take over an hour to mark up my copy (5th printing). Although it's nice he documents this so well, it's a pain in the rear, so you may want to verify the edition you're buying to avoid this extra effort. On page vi, above ISBN, look for reverse sequence; example: "10 9 8 7" indicates 7th printing (cryptic, I know). Most recent printing is 15th edition (least amount of errata). The book is loaded with equations and diagrams. It would be nice to see more derivations, but at least the equations are there in the text, and in the appendix. I thought a few other reviewers were a bit harsh. The book is not perfect, but nevertheless a great resource. His second book is impressive, but more advanced; this original title is my "workhorse" book. also, check out his website (sigcon.com) for lots of articles and resources.

As a researcher in board-level programmable device design, i found it always be my "real bible" for solving lots of practical problems. This book not only gives you practical design considerations, but it does provides teoretical interpretations. I like the "points to remember". Thank You.

Being a hardware designer for DSP and CPU boards, this is the most interesting book I have read the last 10 years. I read the entire book nodding my head and saying "This all makes sense". All the theory is there, but what makes it readable is the autor's comments on what really matters; such as: "The inductance of vias is more important than their capacitance to digital designers"

Very good balance of theory and practice, nice examples from the real world, must-read for anybody designing high speed digital logic and having PCB board design in mind.

I was first introduced to this book when I signed up for a class at University of California, Santa Cruz - Extension. The class was titled "High Speed PCB & System Design". There were people with varied levels of experience (beginner to veteran) in the class. Almost everyone thought that the topics that were covered in this book (which was the prescribed text book for the class) were just what was needed to fill the void in the learning process to become a successful design engineer. Lot of the material covered in this book has been handed down by word of mouth for many years. This book covers many important aspects of board design - transmission lines, grounding, cross talk, reflections, termination & vias. In the high speed world if proper design principles are not applied, signals can behave in an unusual manner. Signal integrity is of utmost importance. None of these are dealt with such a practical approach in school, and hence this subject matter came to be known as "black magic" among practicing engineers. This book covers analog & digital design principles in depth, and gives you real world examples. At the end of every section, the authors summarize the key points that were learnt from that discussion. It is a very useful feature. You can just refer to these if you have to find out what kind of termination your signal needs or how long you can run a clock line without signal interference. In addition to these essential topics, this book also covers other useful topics such as clock distribution, cables & connectors. It is needless to say that this book in the right instructor's hands would be an explosive combination.