On 11/28/2012 11:52 PM, M. Simon wrote:
I was going to post an anecdote about termination to the list and then thought
that the piece would make a great column. It did. My magazine featured it in
one of its daily mailings.
If you want to check it out: http://www.ecnmag.com/blogs/2012/11/long-lines-pcb
... and again rise-time is your enemy, unless you know what you are doing.
Another war-story was in the early days of the company, when we made the
first boards and had issues on the 1,0625 GBd serial links giving
significant bit-errors. They where fighting the issue and it dragged
out. One morning I came to the office, took my morning coffee and
strolled into the lab, picked up a board and just looked at it, just for
fun. I was following the traces and looked at it, and then suddenly I
realized that someone had located the terminating resistors of the PECL
pair at the wrong end of the transmission line. The designer didn't
think of it as a problem, as the 50 ohm load to ground was there, so
what is the problem? I chose not to take the fight, but I did leave him
with the notion that I was not convinced by his argument.
He kept fighting the issue for several days, until he out of desperation
tried my advice, and out of his big surprise it did work. Only then he
made the comment that there might be something in that "Black Magic"
book that I had bought and distributed.
It can be OK to run without or with the wrong termination, if you know
the situation will remain stable and you verify that it behaves the way
you expect it to do, but if not, do your terminations seriously,
consider both source and destination termination and reflections.
And *do* recall that a frequency might require a certain
slew-rate/rise-time, but the rise-time triggers the reflections and
couplings every time it occurs, regardless of the rate. So, design for
the rise/fall-time you have, and not the frequency.
Cheers,
Magnus
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