Digital Signal Transmission

[ray-dude]

4 minutes ago, Superdad said:

Funny thing is: DAC and other digital engineers (especially if you get into RF, telecommunications, and microwave engineering) deal with the ground-plane and clock issues in their designs as a matter-of-course. Really nothing new of controversial about any of it.

 

+1000 this.  The amount of hard core engineering that goes into these factors is off the charts.  I too find it amazing that folks extrapolate idealized abstractions to how things actually work at the physical layer.  Abstractions are critical for operating at a higher level (network stacks, switches, kernels, etc), but we have to focus on the reality at the level of reality we're trying to manage/optimize.  

 

If you care about the ground and reference voltage plane and how noise (and self induced noise) on these planes impacts a D to A circuit, you have to operate at that level, not the bits are bits level.  If you're building a streaming service, you operate at the socket and protocol level, not the bits are bits level.  

 

Different horses for different courses, and a large part of the art of engineering is the wisdom to know which idealized abstractions to apply and optimize for different design challenges.