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,[1] and was recognized by the IEEE as an "Outstanding Contributor" to the IEEE P802.3z Gigabit Task Force.
Johnson has significantly raised awareness of analog effects at work in high speed digital electronic systems.
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.