Textbook in PDF format

This book is about how to design the most complex types of digital circuit boards used inside servers, routers and other equipment, from high-level system architecture down to the low-level signal integrity concepts. It explains common structures and subsystems that can be expanded into new designs in different markets.
The purpose of this book is to show all aspects of a hardware design engineer’s job in the more high-end digital board segments. This individual is sometimes called a hardware engineer, hard- ware design engineer, electrical engineer, electronics design engineer, CCA, or PCA engineer. The book is focused mainly on low-level detailed circuit implementation, but it also discusses high-level aspects like systems and manufacturing. This book is about advanced hardware design, so it is assumed that the reader has an EE degree and has already designed some lower-complexity digital circuit boards. There are short introductions to all topics, but the focus is on more advanced material.
This book includes a large amount of signal integrity topics, about half of the book’s volume, and it focuses on how to apply them in a corporate design project by the designer. The rest of the topics are about hardware architecture and various engineering activities that are loosely affected by signal integrity in various ways. Complex hardware is always high speed, and it includes a large number of high-speed signals at high density. High-density, high-speed design is different from basic high-speed design with few high-speed signals. The large number of them at close proximity creates the need for advanced SI/PI mitigation solutions, which we study in this book. Complexity also has emergent properties. Complex hardware has structures and functional circuits that do not exist in simple circuit boards. Complex boards are not simply more of the same that we see in simpler boards. For example, a microcontroller board would not need a second processor for system management. A laptop motherboard would not need several FPGAs.
In this book we use the “slang” ASIC for any large high-bandwidth digital chip, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and actual ASICs, to simplify the text. Designing boards for these four types is very similar, and most chapters are applicable to all of them. Another convention in the book is the many references to “speed” in Gbps, that is for each signal net, it does not refer to the total bandwidth of a multi-lane port, as the difficulty level for our work depends on the speed of each signal.
Most of the concepts and solutions described in this book are very common in the high-tech hardware industry—at least dozens of companies and hundreds of engineers practice them every day. Thus, they can be considered industry-wide best practices or de facto standards. Some of the ideas in the book are unique; however, they have been developed to make our work easier or more effective.
The book is targeted at all levels of hardware engineers. There are shorter, lower-level introductions to every topic, while the book also takes the reader all they way to the most complex and most advanced topics of digital circuit design, layout design, analysis, and hardware architecture