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Professor Jesson’s Tutorial on Digital Signal Integrity

Professor Joe Jesson, a Visiting & Adjunct Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at TCNJ, worked with his spring 2014 ELC-441 Digital Engineering Systems Class to create an advanced tutorial about digital signal integrity as one of the course project deliverables. This advanced digital engineering class educates students on the unique properties of high speed digital circuits and builds upon the knowledge gained with the prerequisite ENG-312 understanding of digital logic – Boolean logic through the Hardware Description Language, Verilog HDL.

In order to understand and visualize the electromagnetic effects of high-speed digital designs implemented on printed circuit boards, we introduced electromagnetic 3D modeling tools.  Also, during the class the students were given an assignment to simulate and document the results of a specified switched digital gate and PCB trace length as a transmission line.  I asked the students to document the results in a tutorial format, illustrating the steps from the above model.  The complete 3D visual RF model as output screens from Sonnet Software, an electromagnetic modeling tool which we applied to our required textbook assignments and our textbook electromagnetic models.  “Modern logic gate switching rates demands the need for such an electromagnetic modeling design tool”, Jesson says.

After the tutorials were edited and updated, the tutorial was offered to the CEO of Sonnet Software, Dr. James Rautio – he loved the tutorial and asked if he could immediately publish this tutorial on the Sonnet web site!  The tutorial can be found under the Resources section on the Sonnet homepage, under the sub-heading Applications, titled “Digital Signals Integrity Tutorial, Sonnet Microstrip Models.”   Jesson credits all of his students by name on the title page, “I made sure I was inclusive of the entire class.”
Jesson was also pleased to have Brazilian students in his ELC-441 class, who were very involved in the tutorial process.  “The cool part is that now the students now have work published on Sonnet Software’s commercial website,” Jesson says. “The students were thrilled to have their name on it!”  Professor Jesson and his classes’ tutorial can be found here, and the Portuguese version can be found here.

Contact

Armstrong Hall, Room 165
The College of New Jersey
P.O. Box 7718
2000 Pennington Rd.
Ewing, NJ 08628

609.771.2538
engineer@tcnj.edu

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