What I Learned this Month

I’m not willing to say print is dead, but if it doesn’t evolve, it may be left in the digital dust. I am finding more and more multi media resources on the web. As someone who has created quite a bit of multi media, I know it takes more time, and more takes, to create a video piece than a a written piece.

I see three types of video pieces being generated and posted online these days: straight up marketing commercials or infomercials, interviews with experts and tutorials. I recently came across the EngineeringTV portal with more than 1200 videos spanning a wide range of engineering topics such as embedded computing, rf, medical and aerospace applications.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a 9 minute video might be worth a thousand pictures. This is especially true when the video is a demo rather than just a recorded presentation. Even just a recorded lecture is useful when you can see the cursor moving on the slides. It literally is like attending the live lecture.

The biggest drawback to most of the online video content out there is that most posted videos are just infomercials. The signal to noise ratio of an infomercial is generally not very high.

However, here are few videos on the EngineeringTV site that are useful to take a look at. Here are a few recommendations;

Hercules, a petawatt laser (just like a laser pointer, but bigger)

2011 salary survey of electrical engineers

A very nice series of tutorials on transmission line simulation using AWR tools.

Part 1 of a 3 part series from AWR (from which the image above was taken.

S-parameters have become the defacto standard to describe the electrical properties of interconnects. While historically, the formalism around them was developed in the frequency domain, they can also be used to describe the time domain behavior of interconnects.

The illustration above, taken from a recent paper Alan Blankman and I wrote for an Australian publication, introduces the features behind S-parameters and how they can be measured or simulated. If you want to launch your path into the world of S-parameters, you might want to check out the article we wrote, and maybe the S-parameter class I teach.

It’s not cats playing piano or raccoons with their heads in peanut butter jars, but some of the videos on the EDN video vault can be as entertaining. Here is a growing collection of short videos contributed by experts and journalists that relate to electronics design and tricks and tips that might be useful to us practicing engineers and geeks at heart. Here is a short list of recommended videos to give you a feel. Check them all out here.

MakerBot’s MK 7 3D Printer 

A memorial to Bob Pease and his office, just as messy as it was 50 years ago.

SPARQ overview video

The Molex high-speed ride from send to end, through on-ramps and backplanes and off ramps

A number of video app notes by the late, great Jim Williams, my analog guru from whom who I learned analog design as a young undergraduate at MIT.

Hope for a new generation of engineers: we need more Samuel Majors for the future of the US.

In my Differential Pair Design class, I emphasize the three trends in all high speed serial links:

1. all interfaces are differential channels
2. all interfaces are currently at multi gigabit data rates
3. all interfaces have a roadmap to go to ever higher data rates

In a recent article in EE Times, Dr. Claude Gauthier, of MoSys, presented a very nice chart, shown above, which illustrates these trends perfectly.

In his article, “Overcoming 40G/100G SerDes design and implementation challenges”, he offers three end user applications which drive the “need for speed”:

1. internet consumer applications such as Facebook, YouTube and IP-TV
2. data intensive solutions: weather modeling, genome research, and financial analysis
3. the rise of cloud computing and storage

These three applications will demand ever higher data rates for all of our electronic products.

Gauthier goes on in his article to provide an analysis of the PLL performance in one of his SerDes designs. He suggests that in a 10 Gbps channel, to meet the 1 part in 10^15 BER specifications, “the PLL must exhibit ultra low jitter, on the order of sub-600 fsec.”

If you are in the multi Gigabit regime, check out his article.