Transmission-line basics and characteristic impedance, reflections and termination, crosstalk, ground bounce, decoupling for power integrity, and reading an eye diagram — the physical-layer reasoning every high-speed digital design depends on.
Past a certain edge rate, a PCB trace stops behaving like a simple wire and starts behaving like a transmission line with its own characteristic impedance — and every signal-quality problem a fast digital design runs into, from ringing to crosstalk to a corrupted "quiet" output, traces back to that one shift in how the trace has to be modeled. This module builds the reasoning chain from first principles: why impedance mismatches produce reflections, why adjacent traces couple energy into one another, why simultaneous switching outputs can bounce a chip's own ground reference, and why a power delivery network needs decoupling capacitors placed with real intention rather than scattered across a board.
By the end of this module you should be able to read an eye diagram and connect its closure back to a specific physical cause, and understand why signal integrity is inseparable from the PCB stackup decisions covered in Module 7 — the physical structure everything in this module is ultimately measuring the consequences of. Module 11, High-Speed Design, picks this reasoning up directly and extends it into differential pairs, length matching, and gigabit-class signaling.