Slightly off topic, but when I saw the power distribution bus with nine different outputs for this tiny little thing, I contemplated that we've come a long way from when I was a kid and everything ran off a single 5 volt ttl bus. It seems the more people say analog is dead, and thats all I've heard my entire life, the more you actually need analog EEs.
Could you elaborate on that? High-speed hardware interests the hell out of me, but I don't have any hands-on experience there. Any books or exercises you could recommend?
Maybe the mid-level ham radio microwave experimenters? Obviously Microwave Update conference proceedings articles about 47 GHz amplifier design and 112 GHz subharmonic mixers are not relevant on the high end for being way too high for mere digital people, and the 80 meter (aka 3.5 MHz) band guys are a bit on the low end for what you're trying to do...
The 20 year old ARRL microwave experimenters manual from the local public library isn't so bad of an introduction to the issues and technology. Yes its old. But, yes, SMA connectors still resonate above 18 GHz, or yes, people still build stuff with microstrip, yes a smith chart still works like a smith chart, even if you view it on a computer screen now.
At a much lower frequency level but still relevant, the late Bob Pease has a nice book "Troubleshooting analog electronics" although his monthly magazine articles were probably equally informative and are (were?) free. A reprint of his magazine columns would probably make a highly practical (as opposed to theoretical) analog engineering curriculum. A lot of troubleshooting issues that are annoyances at low frequencies are big issues at higher ones. Or the mental process of bypassing a power lead is about the same, even if the tech changes with frequency.
I think its interesting to read classic bitsavers manuals. How did Cray test those modules, anyway? Well read from the source. Layout densities have changed drastically, fundamental issues have not.
Unfortunately I learned EE as an apprentice with no books but I've heard High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic [1] is good.
Understanding why high speed is more like RF and analog electronics has a lot to do with impedance, which is the "resistance" of a material to a change in current at a specific frequency. Ohm's law is impedance at 0hz (DC current) but it gets a lot more complicated when you have a 133 Mhz bus because now the signal is changing fast enough that a lot of interesting effects start to pop up. For example, the capacitance of the PCB has a significant effect on rise times, your trace lengths have to be within 1/20th of the wavelength of the signal of each other or the bits might arrive at different times, you have to start worrying about other Mhz+ noise from the power supply based solely on the location of traces (hence you have to place filter/bypass caps more carefully), you have to worry about mismatched impedances (the "resistance" @ 133 mhz is different between the trace and a pin or something) or else you'll have a lot of energy "reflected" back at the signal source, adding interference patterns, etc. You never really see any of this in hobbyist electronics unless you have a really long cable for Khz signals or are trying to use something like SPI at 100Mhz. Once you start dealing with high end ARM chips, DSPs, DDR2-3, PCI[e], gigabit ethernet, HDMI, these traces become very prevalent.
However the beauty of digital is that you don't really have to understand all of the analog that goes behind it. There are a lot of simple engineering rules that make it very difficult to mess up a high speed digital design (at least in my experience). If you have a tool like Altium, managing all the impedances, trace widths and lengths, differential pairs becomes a cake walk. If you know what an error looks like in an oscilloscope (whether its a rise time problem, reflection problem, etc) then you'll find it easy to work in the field. Then there's actual RF engineering, which is a whole other story (digital signals are rarely more than the mW range, RF engineering also goes beyond that into W-KW-MW range).
I find that hard to believe because I can't imagine teaching EE beyond the first year without running face first into impedance. I mean, any time you touch on RF (which is the really interesting part of analog anyway) you have to somehow talk about the difference between DC and AC, unless you talk about it in an exclusively academic way as if it's some EE relic that you'll never use. It might come down to the fact that everyone is taught Ohm's Law first, which for me seems a terrible way to teach EE because it forces an immutable, instantaneous relationship for your circuit (aka spooky action at a distance) whereas impedance has a meaning grounded in how the electrons interact with matter. I threw away everything I learned in EE/ohm's law when my mentor taught me impedance because the mathematics, units, and physical intuition finally fell into place.
The benefit of an apprenticeship is that you are usually taught in a project setting with tools that have this knowledge largely built in. All you have to know is the theoretical implications of each of your use cases (and there aren't many in say, consumer smartphone design, except for the antenna) and what the jargon is for your software. Altium has "matched lengths," "interactive differential pair routing," "impedance matching," etc. which you can use with specific engineering calculators ( http://www.mantaro.com/resources/impedance_calculator.htm is my favorite) and the software will do the rest. Literally, point, click, and drag.
I should probably clarify. What I meant to say is that they don't really teach high-frequency analog design in school. We covered the theoretical aspects, like impedance matching and reflection, but there's a long way between knowing those things and being able to reason with them when designing a chip.
Well if you understood the fundamentals it's actually not that far to being able to design a board. Designing a chip is a whole other matter but can also be quite easy if you are comfortable with FPGAs and using IP cores. I'd say there's about a 0% chance of you having your own fab so the ASIC firm you hire will usually help you synthesize the high level language design to silicon (for a price).
Once you're comfortable with your routing tool, check out the following links. This is the material I use as a refresher when jumping back into high speed digital design:
I should mention that I'm a computer engineering major and not a EE major, so I haven't taken some of the more advanced physics classes like solid state physics or electromagnetics. Are there any resources you would recommend for getting more of the theoretical background on those topics?
I've tried to learn the physics behind EE but my brain has been shot too many times by primary through secondary education. As a CS major you can dive in depth into the PCI/DDR standards and they will teach you alot about the signals. Combine it with a application note on DDR routing and you'll get the big picture.
