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Bert's Practical Design Notes: Accelerating the SI Learning Curve - Bogatin's SI Academy

Last year, Dr. Eric Bogatin, the “Signal Integrity Evangelist,” announced the end of his famous signal integrity classes. At the time I remember thinking to myself, "What's next for Eric?”

If you know Eric, like I do, you realize that the end of one phase of his career usually means the start of the next one. And now we know what that is. You see, Eric has been busy the last six months preparing to launch his new Teledyne LeCroy Signal Integrity Academy Web portal.

Eric is currently a signal integrity evangelist with Teledyne LeCroy, and on the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he recently moved to from Kansas.

He has a BS degree in physics from MIT, and MS and PhD degrees in physics from the University of Arizona in Tucson. He has held senior engineering and management positions at Bell Labs, Raychem, Sun Microsystems, Ansoft, and Interconnect Devices. Prior to joining Teledyne Lecroy, he ran a successful company providing signal integrity training, Bogatin Enterprises, along with his wife Susan.

I met and got to know Eric in 2008, when we collaborated on our first DesignCon paper for 2009, Practical Analysis of Backplane Vias. We were privileged to win a Best Paper award that year. Since that time we have worked on several projects together, and have become good friends. The last project we worked on was for a DesignCon2013 paper titled, Dramatic Noise Reduction using Guard Traces with Optimized Shorting Vias, which also won a Best Paper award.

Over the years, I have studied much of Eric's work through his papers, articles, webinars, blogs, and content from his previous website. I always made it a point to catch all of his presentations at any conferences I attended. I have his first edition book, Signal Integrity Simplified as well. It has been one of my go-to books when starting any of my research projects or trying to grasp concepts.

Like the other go-to signal integrity books in my library, it is well marked and used, though this one seems more so than others. Having the privilege of working with Eric has also enriched my learning experience. Read the full column here.Editor's Note: This column originally appeared in the July 2014 issue of The PCB Design Magazine.