Mastering High-Speed Serial I-O Technology

Overview

What you will study

The Mastering High-Speed Serial I-O Technology course offered by University of Oxford helps engineers master electrical signal analysis and hardware debug at data rates from 2.5 to 400 Gb/s.

• See how three key innovations—differential signaling, clock recovery, and equalization— enabled today’s high data rates; why they’re needed, how they work, and possible alternatives.

• Master the physical causes of signal distortion—loss, reflections, ISI (inter-symbol interference), crosstalk, and all types of jitter and noise—how to identify them, how to correct them, and, when necessary, how to live with them.

• Understand  how signals behave in both the time and frequency domains and how to measure and interpret S-parameters, waveforms, eye diagrams, BER (bit error ratio) contours, and bathtub plots using oscilloscopes, VNAs (vector network analyzers), TDR (time-domain reflectometry), BER testers, and spectrum and phase noise analyzers.

• Explore the bandwidth-complexity tradeoff between NRZ and PAM4 signaling schemes for lane rates of 50+ Gb/s and the new measurement techniques for evaluating PAM4 signals along with the pros and cons of forward error correction (RS-FEC). Using examples from cutting edge technologies – PCIe, OIF-CEI, SATA, Fiber Channel, 50-400 Gigabit Ethernet