Transmission Lines in Digital and Analog Electronic Systems - by Clayton R Paul (Mixed Media Product)

Book Synopsis

In the last 30 years there have been dramatic changes in electrical technology--yet the length of the undergraduate curriculum has remained four years. Until some ten years ago, the analysis of transmission lines was a standard topic in the EE and CpE undergraduate curricula. Today most of the undergraduate curricula contain a rather brief study of the analysis of transmission lines in a one-semester junior-level course on electromagnetics. In some schools, this study of transmission lines is relegated to a senior technical elective or has disappeared from the curriculum altogether. This raises a serious problem in the preparation of EE and CpE undergraduates to be competent in the modern industrial world. For the reasons mentioned above, today's undergraduates lack the basic skills to design high-speed digital and high-frequency analog systems. It does little good to write sophisticated software if the hardware is unable to process the instructions. This problem will increase as the speeds and frequencies of these systems continue to increase seemingly without bound. This book is meant to repair that basic deficiency.

From the Back Cover

A MUCH-NEEDED PRIMER ON ALL ASPECTS OF TRANSMISSION LINES FOR ELECTRIC AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING GRADUATES

Most of today's electrical engineering and computer engineering graduates lack a critically important skill: the analysis of transmission lines. They need this basic knowledge in order to be able to design high-speed digital and high-frequency analog systems--and this problem will only get worse as the speeds and frequencies of these systems continue to increase. This important text is the remedy. It prepares readers for increasingly difficult design problems in today's ever-changing high-speed digital world, focusing on signal integrity and crosstalk.

Class-tested under the author's expert guidance at Mercer University, the book starts by reviewing the fundamental concepts of waves, wavelength, time delay, and electrical dimensions, as well as the bandwidth of digital signals and its relation to the pulse rise/fall times. It then explains two-conductor transmission lines and designing for signal integrity, addressing the time-domain analysis of those transmission lines and the corresponding analysis in the frequency domain. The terminal voltages and currents of lines with various source waveforms and resistive terminations are computed by hand via wave tracing. This gives considerable insight into the general behavior of transmission lines in terms of forward- and backward-traveling waves and their reflections. The effect of line losses including skin effect in the line conductors and dielectric losses in the surrounding dielectric are increasingly becoming critical, and their detrimental effects are discussed.

Next, the book repeats these topics for three-conductor lines in terms of the important detrimental effects of crosstalk between transmission lines, explaining the transmission-line equations for lossless lines, the important per-unit-length matrices of the inductance and capacitance of the lines, and the solution of three-conductor, lossless lines via mode decoupling. The final chapter concludes by investigating the effects of the line losses on the crosstalk of these three-conductor lines.

Each chapter concludes with numerous problems for the reader to practice his/her understanding of the material. An Appendix contains a brief tutorial on SPICE (PSPICE), an important computational tool that is used extensively throughout the book. A companion website features several computer programs used and described in this book for computing the per-unit-length parameter matrices and a subcircuit model for three-conductor lines, as well as two MATLAB programs for computing the Fourier components of a digital waveform and two versions of PSPICE.

This book is intended as a textbook for a senior/first-year graduate-level course in transmission lines in electrical engineering and computer engineering curricula. It is also essential for industry professionals as a compact review of transmission line fundamentals.

Review Quotes

"All mathematical calculations are performed clearly and in a very good manner. From this point of view, the
book is very useful for students and teachers." (Zentralblatt MATH, 2011)

About the Author

CLAYTON R. PAUL has been the Sam Nunn Eminent Chair in Aerospace Engineering and a professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Mercer University since 1997. He is an emeritus professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Kentucky, where he taught for twenty-seven years.