As George Costanza would say, “DesignCon is back, baby!” The show opened Wednesday morning, and it really felt like old times again. The aisles of the Santa Clara Convention Center were busy, and the classrooms for the technical conference were nearly full. And I spoke—or tried to speak—with quite a few engineers who spoke almost no English. That’s a good sign; in recent years, there were very few attendees from outside the U.S. because of Covid restrictions. The Pacific Rim is well represented this year.

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An eye diagram is a useful tool for the analysis of signals used in digital transmission. It provides a quick scan of system performance and can offer insight into the nature of channel imperfections. An eye diagram is simply a graphical display of a serial data signal with respect to time that shows a pattern that resembles an eye. Careful scrutiny of this visual display can give one a first-order approximation of signal-to-noise, clock timing jitter, reflections and skew. In this month’s column, I will take an eyeball look at the eye diagram.

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One of the biggest challenges facing PCB designers is not understanding the cost drivers in the PCB manufacturing process. This article is the latest in a series that will discuss these cost drivers (from the PCB manufacturer’s perspective) and the design decisions that will impact product reliability.

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