Designing Interfaces

designing_interfacesThe most important part of a digital system design is the interfaces. Each piece in the system, whether it is a device purchased from a vendor, or a re-used design clip that consists of multiple devices and their interconnects, or a programmable device such as an FPGA will probably be okay on their own. But what makes it a system is the interconnect of all these pieces. And that is where things go wrong.

There are various aspects of interface design. Let’s look at them one by one.

IO Technology

Designer needs to make sure that the IO driver and receiver technologies are compatible between two sides. For differential signalling, there are various IO technologies available, such as LVDS, LVPECL, CML, HSCL, etc to name a few. More