High-Speed Digital System 
Design—A Handbook of 
Interconnect Theory and Design 
Practices  
Stephen H. Hall  
Garrett W. Hall  
James A. McCall 
A Wiley-Interscience Publication JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC. 
New York • Chichester • Weinheim • Brisbane • Singapore • Toronto  
Copyright © 2000 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 
All rights reserved. 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:  
Hall, Stephen H. 
High-speed digital system design: a handbook of interconnect theory and design 
practices/Stephen H. Hall, Garrett W. Hall, James A. McCall 
p. cm. 
ISBN 0-471-36090-2 (cloth) 
1. Electronic digital computers—Design and construction.2. Very high speed integrated 
circuits—Design and construction.3. Microcomputers—Buses.4. Computer interfaces.I. Hall, 
Garrett W.II. McCall, James A.III. Title.  
TK7888.3 H315 2000 
621.39'8—dc21                                                                                   00-025717 
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 
Preface 
Overview 
This book covers the practical and theoretical aspects necessary to design modern high-
speed digital systems at the platform level. The book walks the reader through every 
required concept, from basic transmission line theory to digital timing analysis, high-speed 
measurement techniques, as well as many other topics. In doing so, a unique balance 
between theory and practical applications is achieved that will allow the reader not only to 
understand the nature of the problem, but also provide practical guidance to the solution. 
The level of theoretical understanding is such that the reader will be equipped to see beyond 
the immediate practical application and solve problems not contained within these pages. 
Much of the information in this book has not been needed in past digital designs but is 
absolutely necessary today. Most of the information covered here is not covered in standard 
college curricula, at least not in its focus on digital design, which is arguably one of the most 
significant industries in electrical engineering. 
The focus of this book is on the design of robust high-volume, high-speed digital products 
such as computer systems, with particular attention paid to computer busses. However, the 
theory presented is applicable to any high-speed digital system. All of the techniques 
covered in this book have been applied in industry to actual digital products that have been 
successfully produced and sold in high volume. 
Practicing engineers and graduate and undergraduate students who have completed basic 
electromagnetic or microwave design classes are equipped to fully comprehend the theory 
presented in this book. At a practical level, however, basic circuit theory is all the 
background required to apply the formulas in this book. 
Chapter 1 describes why it is important to comprehend the lessons taught in this book. 
(Authored by Garrett Hall) 
Chapter 2 introduces basic transmission line theory and terminology with specific digital 
focus. This chapter forms the basis of much of the material that follow. (Authored by Stephen 
Hall) 
Chapters 3 and 4 introduce crosstalk effects, explain their relevance to digital timings, and 
explore nonideal transmission line effects. (Authored by Stephen Hall)  
Chapter 5 explains the impact of chip packages, vias, connectors, and many other aspects 
that affect the performance of a digital system. (Authored by Stephen Hall) 
Chapter 6 explains elusive effects such as simultaneous switching noise and nonideal 
current return path distortions that can devastate a digital design if not properly accounted 
for. (Authored by Stephen Hall) 
Chapter 7 discusses different methods that can be used to model the output buffers that are 
used to drive digital signals onto a bus. (Authored by Garrett Hall) 
Chapter 8 explains in detail several methods of system level digital timing. It describes the 
theory behind different timing schemes and relates them to the high-speed digital effects 
described throughout the book. (Authored by Stephen Hall) 
Chapter 9 addresses one of the most far-reaching challenges that is likely to be encountered: 
handling the very large number of variables affecting a system and reducing them to a 
manageable methodology. This chapter explains how to make an intractable problem 
tractable. It introduces a specific design methodology that has been used to produce very 
high performance digital products. (Authored by Stephen Hall) 
Chapter 10 covers the subject of radiated emissions, which causes great fear in the hearts of 
system designers because radiated emission problems usually cannot be addressed until a 
prototype has been built, at which time changes can be very costly and time-constrained. 
(Authored by Garrett Hall) 
Chapter 11 covers the practical aspects of making precision measurements in high-speed 
digital systems. (Authored by James McCall) 
Acknowledgments 
Many people have contributed directly or indirectly to this book. We have been fortunate to 
keep the company of excellent engineers and fine peers. Among the direct, knowing 
contributors to this book are: 
  Dr. Maynard Falconer, Intel Corporation 
  Mike Degerstrom, Mayo Foundation, Special Purpose Processor Development Group 
  Dr. Jason Mix, Intel Corporation 
  Dorothy Hall, PHI Incorporated 
We would also like to recognize the following people for their continuing collaboration over 
the years, which have undoubtedly affected the outcome of this book. They have our thanks. 
  Howard Heck, Intel Corporation; Oregon Graduate Institute 
  Michael Leddige, Intel Corporation 
  Dr. Tim Schreyer, Intel Corporation 
  Harry Skinner, Intel Corporation 
  Alex Levin, Intel Corporation 
  Rich Melitz, Intel Corporation 
  Wayne Walters, Mayo Foundation, Special Purpose Processor Development Group 
  Pat Zabinski, Mayo Foundation, Special Purpose Processor Development Group 
  Dr. Barry Gilbert, Mayo Foundation, Special Purpose Processor Development Group 
  Dr. Melinda Picket-May, Colorado State University 
Special thanks are also given to Jodi Hall, Stephen's wife, without whose patience and 
support this book would not have been possible. 
Chapter 1: The Importance of Interconnect 
Design 
OVERVIEW 
The speed of light is just too slow. Commonplace, modern, volume-manufactured digital 
designs require control of timings down to the picosecond range. The amount of time it takes 
light from your nose to reach your eye is about 100 picoseconds (in 100 ps, light travels 
about 1.2 in.). This level of timing must not only be maintained at the silicon level, but also at 
the physically much larger level of the system board, such as a computer motherboard. 
These systems operate at high frequencies at which conductors no longer behave as simple 
wires, but instead exhibit high-frequency effects and behave as transmission lines that are 
used to transmit or receive electrical signals to or from neighboring components. If these 
transmission lines are not handled properly, they can unintentionally ruin system timing. 
Digital design has acquired the complexity of the analog world and more. However, it has not 
always been this way. Digital technology is a remarkable story of technological evolution. It 
is a continuing story of paradigm shifts, industrial revolution, and rapid change that is 
unparalleled. Indeed, it is a common creed in marketing departments of technology 
companies that "by the time a market survey tells you the public wants something, it is 
already too late." 
This rapid progress has created a roadblock to technological progress that this book will help 
solve. The problem is that modern digital designs require knowledge that has formerly not 
been needed. Because of this, many currently employed digital system designers do not 
have the knowledge required for modern high-speed designs. This fact leads to a 
surprisingly large amount of misinformation to propagate through engineering circles. Often, 
the concepts of high-speed design are perceived with a sort of mysticism. However, this 
problem has not come about because the required knowledge is unapproachable. In fact, 
many of the same concepts have been used for several decades in other disciplines of 
electrical engineering, such as radio-frequency design and microwave design. The problem 
is that most references on the necessary subjects are either too abstract to be immediately 
applicable to the digital designer, or they are too practical in nature to contain enough theory 
to fully understand the subject. This book will focus directly on the area of digital design and 
will explain the necessary concepts to understand and solve contemporary and future 
problems in a manner directly applicable by practicing engineers and/or students. It is worth 
noting that everything in this book has been applied to a successful modern design. 
1.1. THE BASICS 
As the reader undoubtedly knows, the basic idea in digital design is to communicate 
information with signals representing 1s or 0s. Typically this involves sending and receiving 
a series of trapezoidal shaped voltage signals such as shown in Figure 1.1 in which a high 
voltage is a 1 and a low voltage is a 0. The conductive paths carrying the digital signals are 
known as interconnects. The interconnect includes the entire electrical pathway from the 
chip sending a signal to the chip receiving the signal. This includes the chip packages, 
connectors, sockets, as well as a myriad of additional structures. A group of interconnects is 
referred to as a bus. The region of voltage where a digital receiver distinguishes between a 
high and a low voltage is known as the threshold region. Within this region, the receiver will 
either switch high or switch low. On the silicon, the actual switching voltages vary with 
temperature, supply voltage, silicon process, and other variables. From the system 
designers point of view, there are usually high-and low-voltage thresholds, known as Vih and 
Vil, associated with the receiving silicon, above which and below which a high or low value 
can be guaranteed to be received under all conditions. Thus the designer must guarantee 
that the system can, under all conditions, deliver high voltages that do not, even briefly, fall 
below Vih, and low voltages that remain below Vil, in order to ensure the integrity of the data. 
Figure 1.1: Digital waveform.  
 
In order to maximize the speed of operation of a digital system, the timing uncertainty of a 
transition through the threshold region must be minimized. This means that the rise or fall 
time of the digital signal must be as fast as possible. Ideally, an infinitely fast edge rate 
would be used, although there are many practical problems that prevent this. Realistically, 
edge rates of a few hundred picoseconds can be encountered. The reader can verify with 
Fourier analysis that the quicker the edge rate, the higher the frequencies that will be found 
in the spectrum of the signal. Herein lies a clue to the difficulty. Every conductor has a 
capacitance, inductance, and frequency-dependent resistance. At a high enough frequency, 
none of these things is negligible. Thus a wire is no longer a wire but a distributed parasitic 
element that will have delay and a transient impedance profile that can cause distortions and 
glitches to manifest themselves on the waveform propagating from the driving chip to the 
receiving chip. The wire is now an element that is coupled to everything around it, including 
power and ground structures and other traces. The signal is not contained entirely in the 
conductor itself but is a combination of all the local electric and magnetic fields around the 
conductor. The signals on one interconnect will affect and be affected by the signals on 
another. Furthermore, at high frequencies, complex interactions occur between the different 
parts of the same interconnect, such as the packages, connectors, vias, and bends. All 
these high-speed effects tend to produce strange, distorted waveforms that will indeed give 
the designer a completely different view of high-speed logic signals. The physical and 
electrical attributes of every structure in the vicinity of the interconnect has a vital role in the 
simple task of guaranteeing proper signaling transitions through Vih and Vil with the 
appropriate timings. These things also determine how much energy the system will radiate 
into space, which will lead to determining whether the system complies with governmental 
emission requirements. We will see in later chapters how to account for all these things. 
When a conductor must be considered as a distributed series of inductors and capacitors, it 
is known as a transmission line. In general, this must be done when the physical size of the 
circuit under consideration approaches the wavelength of the highest frequency of interest in 
the signal. In the digital realm, since edge rate pretty much determines the maximum 
frequency content, one can compare rise and fall times to the size of the circuit instead, as 
shown in Figure 1.2. On a typical circuit board, a signal travels about half the speed of light 
(exact formulas will be in later chapters). Thus a 500 ps edge rate occupies about 3 in. in 
length on a circuit trace. Generally, any circuit length at least 1/10th of the edge rate must be 
considered as a transmission line. 
Figure 1.2: Rise time and circuit length.  
 
One of the most difficult aspects of high-speed design is the fact that there are a large 
number codependent variables that affect the outcome of a digital design. Some of the 
variables are controllable and some force the designer to live with the random variation. One 
of the difficulties in high-speed design is how to handle the many variables, whether they are 
controllable or uncontrollable. Often simplifications can be made by neglecting or assuming 
values for variables, but this can lead to unknown failures down the road that will be 
impossible to "root cause" after the fact. As timing becomes more constrained, the 
simplifications of the past are rapidly dwindling in utility to the modern designer. This book 
will also show how to incorporate a large number of variables that would otherwise make the 
problem intractable. Without a methodology for handling the large amount of variables, a 
design ultimately resorts to guesswork no matter how much the designer physically 
understands the system. The final step of handling all the variables is often the most difficult 
part and the one most readily ignored by a designer. A designer crippled by an inability to 
handle large amounts of variables will ultimately resort to proving a few "point solutions" 
instead and hope that they plausibly represent all known conditions. While sometimes such 
methods are unavoidable, this can be a dangerous guessing game. Of course, a certain 
amount of guesswork is always present in a design, but the goal of the system designer 
should be to minimize uncertainty. 
1.2. THE PAST AND THE FUTURE 
Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation, predicted that the performance of computers 
will double every 18 months. History confirmed this insightful prediction. Remarkably, 
computer performance has doubled approximately every 1.5 years, along with substantial 
decreases in their price. One measure of relative processor performance is internal clock 
rates. Figure 1.3 shows several processors through history and their associated internal 
clock rates. By the time this is in print, even the fastest processors on this chart will likely be 
considered unimpressive. The point is that computer speeds are increasing exponentially. 
As core frequency increases, faster data rates will be demanded from the buses that feed 
information to the processor, as shown in Figure 1.4, leading to an interconnect timing 
budget that is decreasing exponentially. Decreased timing budgets mean that it is evermore 
important to properly account for any phenomenon that may increase the timing uncertainty 
of the digital waveform as it arrives at the receiver. This is the root cause of two inescapable 
obstacles that will continue to make digital system design difficult. The first obstacle is simply 
that the sheer amount of variables that must be accounted for in a digital design is 
increasing. As frequencies increase, new effects, which may have been negligible at slower 
speeds, start to become significant. Generally speaking, the complexity of a design 
increases exponentially with increasing variable count. The second obstacle is that the new 
effects, which could be ignored in designs of the past, must be modeled to a very high 
precision. Often these new models are required to be three-dimensional in nature, or require 
specialized analog techniques that fall outside the realms of the digital designer's discipline. 
The obstacles are perhaps more profound on the subsystems surrounding the processor 
since they evolve at a much slower rate, but still must support the increasing demands of the 
processor. 
Figure 1.3: Moore's law in action.