Howard Johnson is an electrical engineer, known for his consulting work and commonly referenced books on the topic of signal integrity, especially for high speed electronic circuit design. He served as the chief technical editor for Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet standardisation, and was recognized by the IEEE as an "Outstanding Contributor" to the IEEE P802.3z Gigabit Task Force. Johnson earned his

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

in Electrical Engineering (1978), Masters of Electrical Engineering (1979), and PhD (1982) from

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a private research university in Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranked among the top universities ...

. His dissertation was titled ''The design of DFT algorithms''.

Area of contribution

Johnson has significantly raised awareness of analog effects at work in high speed digital electronic systems. In modern digital systems, it is common for digital designs to be subject to analog effects, even if they operate at a relatively low clock frequency. Circuits operating at lower clock rates can behave as high speed digital systems if there is sufficient high frequency content in the signal edges (when transitioning between digital logic levels) relative to the distance traveled across a printed circuit board. As a result of improvements in semiconductor process, faster edge rates of even "low technology" electronic components can be sufficient to make the system effectively high speed and thus subject to havoc caused by unanticipated analog effects. A good example is his illustration of the matrix of rising edges that result from different combinations of skin-effect and dielectric loss which illustrates PCB design problems one encounters at microwave frequencies. Johnson was also active in the development of two Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards that govern

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1 ...

, IEEE 802.3 Fast Ethernet and IEEE 802.3 Gigabit Ethernet.

Books and publications

Johnson has written three books: * ''High-Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic'' (1993), * ''Fast Ethernet: Dawn of a New Network'' (1995), * ''High-Speed Signal Propagation: Advanced Black Magic'' (2003), Johnson also ran a monthly column at EDN (magazine) entitled ''Signal Integrity'', which was later moved to a
blog
format. He signed off with his last post
Seek inspiration
on 24 June 2013.

References

External links

*
Signal Consulting Inc.
— Howard Johnson's website
Dr Howard Johnson on The Amp Hour Podcast
(10 January 2012)
Howard Johnson's (former) High Speed Digital Design courses at the University of Oxford
{{DEFAULTSORT:Johnson, Howard American electrical engineers Analog electronics engineers Rice University alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people)