D, Many years ago, late 80's, at a large defense company in silicon valley I firsthand experienced SI failures due to SSO in a connector with inadequate ground references. The fast edge rates were BTL. Backplane Transceiver Logic: had controlled edge rates and reduced logic swings and other features which made it a good choice for driving a backplane. The failure was rather dramatic as one might expect if the ground moves by 1V when the bus switches from all 1's to all 0's. I am rather surprised that you have only recently experienced transmission line effects in your designs due to your edge rates. The many books on the topic, see the achieves, should help provide you ample ammunition for you to lobby upper management, failures in the lab will also help your cause but its painful. Good luck John At 06:13 AM 3/26/2004 -0800, you wrote: >Dear experts, >I work for one of the largest aerospace companies in the world. Our systems >are unbelievably complex although our digital edge rates are only recently >starting to cause our interfaces to behave in a distributed manner. I have >been on a crusade the past few months to convince management to form a signal >integrity team and cast aside outdated rules of thumb and the "design it and >hope that it works" mentality. > >I can't help but believe that some of you on this list have been in the same >predicament. I am extremely interested in hearing your stories. More >importantly, I am looking for examples and impacts of device, board, or system >level catastrophic SI failures to help me drive home my point during my next >attempt to show the decision makers the light. > >Thanks in advance for your help. > >Rgds, > >D >------------------------------------------------------------------ >To unsubscribe from si-list: >si-list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field > >or to administer your membership from a web page, go to: >http://www.freelists.org/webpage/si-list > >For help: >si-list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'help' in the Subject field > >List FAQ wiki page is located at: > http://si-list.org/wiki/wiki.pl > >List technical documents are available at: > http://www.si-list.org > >List archives are viewable at: > http://www.freelists.org/archives/si-list >or at our remote archives: > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/si-list/messages >Old (prior to June 6, 2001) list archives are viewable at: > http://www.qsl.net/wb6tpu > ------------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from si-list: si-list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field or to administer your membership from a web page, go to: http://www.freelists.org/webpage/si-list For help: si-list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'help' in the Subject field List FAQ wiki page is located at: http://si-list.org/wiki/wiki.pl List technical documents are available at: http://www.si-list.org List archives are viewable at: http://www.freelists.org/archives/si-list or at our remote archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/si-list/messages Old (prior to June 6, 2001) list archives are viewable at: http://www.qsl.net/wb6tpu