EE-Training

Knowledge makes you Curious

Thanks for Stockholm SI Week 2013

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The first Stockholm SI Week was a great success with more than 70 engineers attending 4 different courses in the wide field of signal integrity. I want to thank each of you for making this a great week for all. All participants took advantage of the course format to ask a lot of questions to the presenter and network with other engineers and the sponsors during breaks.

A timelapse video of the 3-day course by Lee Ritchey on general signal integrity shows how much torture sitting through 3 days of theory is, but notice that everyone is still smiling on the last day. I take that as a good indication that it was worth it. See for yourself how 3 days of training compressed into 30 sec looks (next summer, this could be you – more about that later):

Mon/Tue/Wed was the signal integrity course with Lee Ritchey. Thursday was Lee’s day off and we had the simulation workshop and a theoretical talk on fields and waves to get really deep into the theory. Friday was the stack-up design course.

This was how much you liked the courses:

Results of the evaluation forms - Stockholm SI Week 2013
Results of the evaluation forms – Stockholm SI Week 2013

The week covered many interesting subjects, and as someone who have sat through the course more than 8 times I must say it’s great to see an evolution in the details throughout the course. Always something new from the forefront of high speed digital design. This time was no exception, as Lee Ritchey presented the paper he did for DesignCon 2013 on how to minimize skew in high speed differential lines and getting the most out of the materials. Lee talks about the paper in this video:

LEE_DESIGNCON_2013_VIDEO

By constantly building new test boards like this and sharing the results with the engineering community, we can all learn and improve. The real surprise in this board turned out to be that 3313 as a glass weave used in laminates and prepreg is made in two different ways depending on where it is manufactured. And one of can screw up a very fast differential pair by creating skew that exceeds one bit period just because of the possible difference in DK along the traces. Find this and other interesting papers in the 2013 DesignCon proceedings.

For 2014 I really want to organize another round of training with Lee Ritchey in Europe somewhere, but you need to help me pick the right place by voting below.

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Thanks in advance and have a great summer.