Signal Integrity and High Speed System Design
3-day course with Lee Ritchey (Speeding Edge, Silicon Valley, USA)
Stockholm, December 1-3 2009 (Sign-up closes mid November!)

Don't miss this comprehensive 3-day course with Silicon Valleys "Mr. High Speed".

Three previous courses sold out in record time in Denmark!

Lee Ritchey covers all aspects of high speed design in the class with a practical, in-depth, engineering based approach based on hard earned experience from some of the most challenging designs in the industry.

If you only take one course on the subject of signal integrity - this should be the one!

Background
Electronic designs of all kinds are operating with increasingly faster clock rates and rise times. At the same time, the pressure to complete designs in fewer design cycles is putting pressure on design teams to deliver designs to manufacturing that are "right the first time". In order to account for the normal variations in component edge rates, propagation delay variations, amplifier gains, logic levels and variations in the PCB fabrication process, it is necessary to invoke the use of design tools and methods that allow "preroute" analysis to insure the final product is designed correctly. With the speeds of signals and components rising into the gigahertz range, relying on the traditional bread boarding or hardware prototyping process often results in a product never making it to market.

This increase in component speed has made it necessary for all design engineers to master the design techniques that were once only the province of super computer engineers. This course relies heavily on the proven methods developed for supercomputers and terabit routers. It also draws on experience with disc drives and high performance video games.

3 Practical and Comprehensive Days
This highly practical course is designed to take the student through the entire process involved in designing and fabricating high speed PCBs. It begins with the fundamentals of electromagnetic fields and the behavior of transmission lines that are the basis for all high-speed signaling. From there, it examines all of the aspects of high-speed design leading to the development of a robust set of PCB design rules that accounts for power subsystem design, routing rules and design of PCB stack-ups as well as the fabrication rules needed to balance performance against cost and manufacturability.

The materials and examples used in this course are drawn from actual designs of high speed systems in current manufacture. These examples range from video games to terabit routers and cover the complete range of designs. The design process presented is based on many years of completing designs that are "right the first time". Students are shown many ways to improve their design process so that designs meet this objective. Reliable methods for controlling and containing EMI will also be thoroughly covered.

Part of the last day provides the participants with a unique opportunity to get specific input and solutions to pre-submitted design challenges. We encourage the participants to describe one or two specific design challenges, and submit it for Lee Ritchey to specifically address during this session!

This course addresses the most common high speed problems, including:

• Failures from crosstalk and reflections
• Problems related to time delays in PCB traces
• EMI failures
• Failures stemming from poor power system design
• Failures related to poor IC package design

This course places special emphasis on very high speed differential signaling protocols such as XAUI, Hypertransport, PCI Express, Infiniband, SATA, SSCSI and others that are the backbone of modern computing with ever shorter risetime. Actual circuits are built and tested and then modeled to correlate modeling techniques. The topic of how to design power delivery systems capable of supporting these protocols is also addressed.

Other subjects covered in this SI training by Lee Ritchey includes: eye diagram, eye pattern, IBIS and IBIS models, PDS design, logic levels, edge rates, rise/fall time, rocketIO, rapidio, capacitor types, resistor selection, capacitance, inductance and resistance of capacitors, crosstalk, impedance and impedance matching, transmision lines, propagation delay, termination resistor values, pcb stackup and much more.

See these slides to learn more about the content of this course.

Prerequisites
Any engineering professional who works with high speed design will understand the materials presented. No advanced mathematics are required

The Instructor
LEE RITCHEY, BSEE, founder and president of Speeding Edge, is considered to be one of the industry´s premier authorities on high-speed PCB and system design. Prior to founding Speeding Edge, Ritchey served as program manager at 3Com Corporation where he managed a corporate-wide signal integrity group responsible for the design rules used to develop high performance networking equipment such as routers and switches. Before that, he managed a development team at Maxtor Corporation, a developer of high performance disc drives. He was co-founder of Shared Resources, a design services company specializing in the design of high-end supercomputers, work stations and imaging products. He began his career as a microwave engineer on the Apollo program.

He is currently providing signal integrity engineering services to several network equipment manufacturers as well as a supercomputer project with 110,000 processors and data links running at 5.2 GB/S. He has taught high speed design courses since 1992.

In 2004, Ritchey was a regular columnist for EE Times and he has written many articles on high speed design for trade publications such as EDN, Circuitree and PC Design. He is the author of the book, "Right the First Time, A Practical Handbook on PCB and System Design, Volume 1" published by Speeding Edge in 2003. He recently completed Volume 2 of Right The First Time, A Practical Handbook on High Speed PCB and System Design.

What's Included
This is what you get, when you take this course:

• Three full days of expert training 9:00 to 16:00 interchanging between theory, examples and demonstrations with relevant design tools.
• One copy of the volume 1 book (value: $95).
• 50% discount on the volume 2 book, if purchased when signing up.
• Binder with all course slides. This also includes a list of references to articles for further reading.
• Coffee/the/water + fruit, pastries and a full lunch all 3 days.

Practical Details
Venue: Clarion Hotel Stockholm, Ringvägen 98, Box 20025, 104 60 STOCKHOLM.
You can find more information about Stockholm and the hotel here.

Dates: Tuesday December 1st to Thursday December 3rd, 2009. 3 days total.

Time: 9:00 to 16:00 all 3 days.

Price: DKK 15.500 per person (EUR 2.090).
Register before October 1st, 2009 for only DKK 14.000 per person (EUR 1.890).
Prices are excl. 25% Swedish sales tax/VAT (moms).

Sign up: Go to sign-up

More information: Please contact Axcon tel: +45 4822 9266 or email: courses (at)axcon.dk