Hardware Engineering & Signal Integrity

Book Review: Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

This book predates AI Chat Bots and is more of a history of what led up to them. Read my review below for more information.

Check it out! *Paid link

Is ChatGPT Your Friend or Enemy: You Decide

Using PSPICE Components in LTspice

A recent post on the PCEA Discord server requested a bit of assistance using PSPICE models within LTspice. Here's a quick video explaining how I usually do this!

For reference, this video shows how to download the PSPICE model for the TI LM293 comparator and import it into LTspice . We then set up a very basic circuit to show functionality.

A Coast Guard Boat in a Tornado!

For many years, I've loved listening to Owl City; this affinity has carried down to my children who, along with me, particularly enjoy their latest album. While each song in the album is an excellent story in its own right, we all like the tale told in The Tornado. This led to my own recounting of a time, many years ago, when I experienced some extreme weather while aboard a Coast Guard buoy tender in the Long Island Sound. The kids, in their own manner of storytelling, have begun to tell this story as, "the time daddy was inside the middle of a tornado". While I may not have been in the very center of the storm, it may be fun to explore some historical data and see how close my boat was to the actual tornado.

S-Parameters from a Neural Network

Continuing on the theme of using machine learning to speed up electromagnetic simulations, we've got some new work to share! This paper goes beyond the 2D example previously explored and now looks at full-wave 3D solutions . Most importantly, we wanted to show that this is possible with geometry generalizations. For example, many papers pass things like via drill diameter and other parameters directly as input to their neural networks . We instead mesh the geometry into a 3D rectangular grid and pass this as input to the neural network instead. The result was quite impressive!

Can Machine Learning Replace Field Solvers ?

Some initial research points to yes, for certain applications. Here's a preview of a paper I'll be sharing at this year's IEEE EMC + SIPI conference in Spokane. There's still a lot of work to be done, and I'm admittedly quite a machine learning amateur. Even so, I think there are areas in signal integrity where we can find smart ways to apply machine learning to speed up design cycle time.

PCB Stackup Webinar with Nine Dot Connects

A few months ago, I had the wonderful privilege of presenting a webinar with the great team at Nine Dot Connects (NDC). I've been a huge fan of NDC ever since I first started learning Altium at my first job out of undergrad, so I was thrilled to be asked to work with them. The webinar goes over some important PCB stackup design aspects which are crucial for successful high-speed digital design.

Webinar Recording: DDR5 Post-Layout Verification: Find and Fix Causes of Failure

I recently presented (another) webinar with EMA Design Automation to discuss DDR5 ! This time the discussion was centered around a live post-layout demo. In the example, I showed the analysis of a board with PowerSI (which, of course, had some failures when the DDR report was generated). We then used S-parameter and TDR analysis to track down the failures. Lastly, we used the Clarity Via Wizard to generate new via models and we used Allegro High-Speed Structures to place them in the layout. Lastly, the board was verified to show a passing report.

Webinar Recording: A Dive into DDR5: An Engineers Guide to Simulating and Validating the Latest Generation of DDR

I recently presented a webinar with EMA Design Automation to discuss DDR5 ! I cover the new features added compared to DDR4 then spend some time showing a demo of Cadence Topology Explorer ( TopXp ) including simulation of a full byte lane with IBIS-AMI models.

Why Buy When You Can Spend More Time and Money Making Your Own?

We've all been there: you've got a problem to solve and are faced with the make versus buy decision. In my case, I wanted to switch a USB peripheral between two PCs; that's the only hard requirement. The easiest solution would have been to simply add a USB hub to my KVM switch and call it a day, but that wouldn't carry USB-3 multi-gigabit data rates (not that I needed to, but I wanted to).