PCB Design Challenges: A Package Designer’s Perspective

September 17, 2018 | Bill Acito, Cadence Design Systems

The challenges faced by the PCB designers of today are significant. If we examine the breadth of designs, we find ever-increasing data rates and more high-speed signal routing that drive additional challenges meeting signal-quality requirements, including reflection signal loss and crosstalk issues. At the same time, designers are being asked to complete designs in shorter cycle times and in smaller form factors. They must come up with new and more complex routing strategies to better control impedance and crosstalk. Manual implementation is often time-consuming and prone to layout errors.

Beyond Design: It’s a Material World

September 10, 2018 | Barry Olney, In-Circuit Design Pty. Ltd.

Years ago, when clock frequencies were low and signal rise times were slow, selecting a dielectric material for your PCB was not difficult; we all just used FR-4. And we didn’t really care about the properties of the materials. However, with today’s multi-gigabit designs and their extremely fast rise times and tight margins, precise material selection is crucial to the performance of the product. Materials used for the fabrication of the multilayer PCB absorb high frequencies and reduce edge rates, and that loss in the transmission lines is a major cause of signal integrity issues. But we are not all designing cutting-edge boards and sometimes we tend to over-specify requirements that can lead to inflated production costs.