Signal Integrity

A big “Thank you!” to published author and marketing speaker David Meerman Scott for the shout out for this blog. If you came here from David’s blog, you might be wondering what signal integrity is all about.

Well, if you bought a PC in the mid-1980’s you might remember the clock speed was around 6 MHz (6 million machine processing cycles per second) and the fastest connection to — say — an external disk drive was maybe eight million bytes a second. At those speed the wires joining the chips didn’t degrade the signal between the chips very much and all was well with the world.

Nowadays, the processor is cranking through two or three billion machine processing cycles per second and SuperSpeed USB connectivity at five billion bits per second is on the horizon. At these speeds, a chip-to-chip interconnecting wire only a few inches long can degrade the signal to the point of failure. Signal integrity engineering is about designing the connections in such a way that your PC, your cable modem, and Internet connection works correctly.

So if your PC is working well, thank a signal integrity engineer. If not, then blame Microsoft.

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