GARTHWILSON wrote:
BigDumbDinosaur wrote:
GARTHWILSON wrote:
Dr. Howard Johnson, the high-speed digital-design industry guru, has a column on diode terminations at
http://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/news/2_19.htm. He says they have their place (particularly on slower signals where the diode will actually be fast enough to help), but are not useful for solving certain reflection problems.
The last paragraph in Dr. Johnson's reply is telling:
In slower applications, like SCSI, diode terminations are great, because (1) the signals are intentionally slowed down to meet radiated emissions requirements, so the diodes are naturally faster than the signals, (2) we can afford to build fancy clamping-voltage generators at Vcc-Vf(diode) and Gnd+Vf(diode), and (3) we can specify receivers with tight V(IH), V(IL) margins that are tolerant of the lingering residual reflections.
"...slower applications, like SCSI..." is the key phrase. The current parallel SCSI standard is ultra-320, which is a theoretical bus speed of 320MB/second, 16 times the maximum speed at which a 65C816 can be run.
It took me a long time to find the date on the article I referenced: Jul '98. At that time, according to the Wikipedia article on SCSI, the clock rate was limited to 10MHz, which might explain where he was coming from.
Wikipedia is not exactly correct (not unusual). In 1990, ANSI updated the SCSI standard (X3.131-1990) to 10 MB/second in synchronous mode, but then continued to work on it for a number of technical and political reasons. The result was the 1996 SCSI-2 revision (X3.270-1996) which defined "fast-20 SCSI", meaning the bus could be clocked at 20 MHz in synchronous mode. The 16 bit bus, which had been previously introduced, could transfer data at 40MB/second.
Double-transition clocking was introduced to SCSI c. 1997, which progressed to ultra-160 and ultra-320, the latter being the fastest parallel bus implementation.
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I seem to remember reading there somewhere too that each wire is monodirectional, as is the case with SPI, which would make it easier to get good perform at high clock rates. Is that correct?
All connections are potentially bi-directional. I say "potentially" because any device on the SCSI bus can be an initiator.
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BTW, it looks like the 4Mx8 SRAM module's longest line (which is an address line) is about 3.4" from the tip of the connector pin to the end of the trace. These can be stood up very close together, so using more than one module does not increase the maximum trace length by more than about 0.4" per additional module.
Use of an edge connection scheme, like that of the memory modules used in PCs would have significantly shortened the maximum trace length. It's interesting to note that from inception, the PCI bus was clocked at 33 MHz, using edge connectors.