Mike Resso

Today’s triple play convergence of voice, video and data have transformed the way communication is done between people, places and time. While high speed internet access is delivered using a combination of optical fiber and digital subscriber line (DLS) technologies to its residential base, there is a huge amount of data streaming over copper. The ubiquitous digital ones and zeros are now propagating at edge rates less than 100 picoseconds throughout high speed routers, switches and base stations, so passive interconnect such as backplanes, cables, connectors and printed circuit boards are exhibiting microwave transmission line effects. The traditional tools of digital design engineers such Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) oscilloscopes have given way to multi-port vector network analyzers. It is critical that today’s most modern tools are used to characterize and optimize interconnect in an efficient and intuitive manner. Differential s -parameters, multiple aggressor crosstalk, test suites, automatic fixture removal, de-embedding, measurement-based modeling and data integrity are a few of the topics that will be fair game in this presentation. While some theory will be discussed, the majority of time will be spent on how to solve real world problems in a practical environment.