Digital Signal Integrity: Modeling and Simulation with Interconnects and Packages

Rating:
Summary: Not Very Practical.
Review: I bought this book based on the title, and I was hoping it would give me a practical, real world understanding of noise effects. Unfortunately, for me, this book was far too theoretical. I doubt that many practicing digital VLSI/ASIC engineers will find this book remotely useful. If you're looking for information about how noise affects VLSI designs, and about how to make your designs noise-robust, you won't find it here.

Rating:
Summary: Not Practical. Interesting Theoretical Discussion
Review: This book is not Howard Johnson's "Black Magic..". It is not one of the many books discussing practical rules of thumb to solve EMI and signal integrity issues. It covers the basics but the emphasis is to understand the modeling and simulation of signal integrity issues. It is theoretical but not in a very complicated mathematical way. You don't need to know Maxwell's equations, but you need to be able to follow some simple matrix equations. The book can be a little hard to read at some points but some of the sections are a joy. For example, the simple models showing the skin effect and current crowding are the best I have seen in any book on this subject. Without using any advanced math, but simply breaking down the wires into a few sections and using nothing more than inductance, mutual inductance, and resistance, the author shows how skin effect and current crowding come about. The section on capacitance matrices, definition of partial inductance and the different definitions of inductance: Field-based, Energy-based, and thin wire, clear up many questions I had about these concepts. When I first started using this book for a class I took, I had bought Daly's book as I thought it was easier to read and covered more practical subjects. I have completely changed my first impression. Daly's book although containing many practical subjects is badly written, while this book which doesn't have the friendliest fonts and presentation is actually a very good book. I have to thank the instructor for choosing this book. I would have never bought it on my own.