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MAY 2026 I I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE 97 tion of experts I've read about or had the pleasure of meeting. I've loosely organized them by decade, though there is significant overlap. It is not a tidy relay race where one group hands the baton to the next. These engineers worked concurrently, challeng- ing, debating, and refining one another's ideas, collectively pushing the industry (sometimes reluctantly) toward a deeper respect for physics. I struggled to organize their contributions chrono- logically, and that difficulty itself may mirror how AI is now learning from them faster, and perhaps with greater precision, distilling decades of human trial, error, and hard-earned intuition into algorithms. Signal integrity did not evolve in isolation. It was built gradually over decades, drawing on insights from a diverse group of engineers who trans- formed abstract electromagnetic theory into a practical design discipline. They translated physics into intuition, and then into repeatable engineer- ing practice. Today, as AI absorbs the accumulated knowledge of the field, SI is transitioning from something engineers learn through experience into something that can be partially encoded, simulated, and scaled. Why Signal Integrity Became the Center of Modern Design PCB design engineers have learned that, at high speeds, digital design is no longer dominated solely by logic behavior. Rather, it is by energy traveling through a physical medium. Every transi- tion on a line is subject to reflection if impedance is not controlled. Every return current must find a path, and if that path is disrupted, it creates loop area expansion and radiated emissions. Even a via is no longer electrically transparent; it introduces frequency-dependent impedance changes that must be accounted for. These effects are no longer "edge" cases. Engineers are realizing that they define system behavior. As a result, modern PCB failures fre- quently manifest not as functional design errors but as subtle physical-layer issues, such as bit errors, electromagnetic compatibility violations, degraded timing margins, or unexpected coupling between adjacent structures. In many cases, these writing, he has helped engineers understand the behavior of currents in practical PCB structures. His work consistently emphasizes clarity and accessibility, translating complex electromag- netic interactions into actionable design guid- ance that engineers can apply immediately. Eric Bogatin Building on this shift in thinking, Eric Boga- tin expanded the disci- pline into a measure- ment-driven science. Through his work in industry and academia, including Bell Labs, Sun Micro- systems, and the University of Colorado Boul- der, Bogatin emphasizes that intuition alone is insufficient without validation. His philos- ophy centers on the idea that engineers do not design signals themselves, but rather design for the behavior of energy in a system. His teaching style, which blends theory with experimental validation, has become a corner- stone of modern signal integrity education. Industry Scaling and Power Integrity Era (2000s–early 2010s) The focus expanded from signals alone to full- system behavior, including power distribution. Istvan Novak Istvan Novak has played a central role in defining modern power integrity as a foundational disci- pline that directly impacts signal integrity. His work demonstrates that without a stable and well- designed power distribution network, even the most carefully routed signals will fail to perform reliably. His contributions have helped formal- TA RG E T C O N D I T I O N