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Differential Signal Design, Part 1
October 16, 2013 |Estimated reading time: 1 minute
Introduction
Differential signaling has evolved into the signaling protocol of choice for nearly all emerging designs. Over the years I have written articles covering specific questions on the subject and have devoted chapters to it in Volumes 1 and 2 of my book series, Right the First Time, A Practical Handbook on High-Speed PCB and System Design, as well as articles in our newsletters.
Along with all of this, there has been a flood of both misinformation and accurate information in magazine articles, applications notes and design guides. Some of this misinformation makes PCB layout more complex than it needs to be and some of it actually introduces potential malfunctions.
To help make the design task a little easier and sort through the misinformation, I decided it would be a good idea to pull all of this information together in a single place. This document is devoted to this topic in the hope that it will make it easier for engineers to get up to speed on this subject.
Throughout this article, I will use actual test data to determine where the limits are. At the end, there will be a list of design rules that apply to all differential pairs, along with a list of rules that should not be used as a starting point for creating a full rule set for a PCB or system.
This discussion focuses on differential pairs that are routed over planes as is common in PCBs. Differential pairs that travel on wires, such as UTP, are treated in my aforementioned books.Read the full article here.Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the August 2013 issue of The PCB Design Magazine.