High-speed digital design

What Hacker News says

1. ijustlovemathApr 2026
   While not an RF book per se, High Speed Digital design does a great job of spanning the gap from EE undergrad to the basics of RF as it relates to digital design. I'd also recommend brushing up on more advanced E&M, eg T{E,M} modes and antenna design if you haven't looked at them in a while
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2. cushychickenJun 2024
   In case folks don’t know about the “El Cheapo Special” - you can make very respectable 2GHz passive scope probes with 150ps rise times out of RG-174 coax cable and 1k resistors.

   Clip the cable in half, solder the core to the 1k resistor, and the other end of the 1k resistor to the signal you want to probe.

   Solder the shield braid to board GND.

   50ohm terminate your scope, set probe amplification to 20x, and voila!

   Excellent tip recommended both by Paul Horowitz (Art of Electronics) and Howard Johnson (High Speed Digital Design). Works like a charm!

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3. kjs3Nov 2023
   There's a reason one of the go-to books[1] in this area is subtitled "A Handbook of Black Magic".

   [1]https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp...

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4. mtreis86Oct 2023
   This, for reference see the book High Speed Digital Design by Hall Hall and McCall https://archive.org/details/highspeeddigital0000hall/ The sharper the edge of the digital pulse, the greater the strength of the AC high frequency components. A perfect square wave is the sum of the infinite series of odd harmonics of a sine wave with the same wavelength.
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5. nickpsecurityJul 2023
   These projects are really fun. On the other hand, you might want to learn in a way that lets you build hardware (esp for FPGA's). For that, I suggest a few types of books with examples:

   - Computer architecture or CPU design book covering modern designs with their tradeoffs

   https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Quantitative-Ap...

   - Introduction to Verilog or VHDL (languages for hardware) maybe on FPGA's or well-known boards

   https://www.amazon.com/Programming-FPGAs-Getting-Started-Ver...

   - High Speed Digital Design (many recommended it)

   https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp...

   - Cookbook with many examples for FPGA's

   I don't have one. Most with these titles are expensive. One that looked promising had bad reviews. I'll leave it to HN to fill in the blanks.

   - High-level synthesis

   Most exciting one I remember when I stopped researching this stuff was Synflow. I don't know if they're still around.

   https://www.synflow.com/

   Before that, I had saved Baranov's work which showed how to turn Abstract, State Machines into actual hardware. It was like a how-to on high-level synthesis that he used commercially at Synthezza. I still share them periodically in case someone wants to build an OSS version. I also saw ASM's used in verifying compilers and hardware in separate work. There's a good chance someone can turn many things into a unified, field theory of sorts using ASM's.

   https://www.amazon.com/Finite-State-Machines-Algorithmic-Com...

   https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/second-ebook-samary-baranov-h...

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6. akiselevMay 2023
   That's why one of the best books on high speed digital electronics is titled High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic [1]

   [1] https://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp...

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