Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Capacitance
- 3 Resistance
- 4 Ampère, Faraday, and Maxwell
- 5 Inductance
- 6 Passive device design and layout
- 7 Resonance and impedance matching
- 8 Small-signal high-speed amplifiers
- 9 Transmission lines
- 10 Transformers
- 11 Distributed circuits
- 12 High-speed switching circuits
- 13 Magnetic and electrical coupling and isolation
- 14 Electromagnetic propagation and radiation
- 15 Microwave circuits
- References
- Index
12 - High-speed switching circuits
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Capacitance
- 3 Resistance
- 4 Ampère, Faraday, and Maxwell
- 5 Inductance
- 6 Passive device design and layout
- 7 Resonance and impedance matching
- 8 Small-signal high-speed amplifiers
- 9 Transmission lines
- 10 Transformers
- 11 Distributed circuits
- 12 High-speed switching circuits
- 13 Magnetic and electrical coupling and isolation
- 14 Electromagnetic propagation and radiation
- 15 Microwave circuits
- References
- Index
Summary
A lot of this book has been concerned with time-harmonic excitation and behavior (frequency domain) of passive and distributed elements. This is convenient – as the differential equations simplify to algebraic ones – and it is also a very common situation. Most RF circuits, for example, are narrowband, and therefore for all practical purposes the input signal is a sinusoid at the carrier frequency. But there are a host of situations where the signals of interest are wideband. This includes digital switching circuits, high-speed data circuits, and ultra-wideband circuits and systems. Furthermore, digital circuits are switching increasingly faster, now into the multi-GHz regime. There are also many high-speed links, such as chip-to-chip communication on a PCB. These high-speed interface circuits drive pulses or spectrally rich waveforms on long board traces. We will treat these different cases in a uniform manner by generically calling these circuit applications “high-speed” switching circuits.
Transmission lines and high-speed switching circuits
The focus of the chapter is switching waveforms on transmission lines. You may wonder why we would use transmission line analysis for switching circuits, especially small on-chip or on-board circuits. Let's take a practical example to get a feel for the problem. Let's say a digital chip has a dimension of less than 1 cm. For a time-harmonic circuit, we know that we may treat most structures as lumped as long as their dimension does not exceed 1/10λ.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007