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Your modern digital board is most likely classified as high speed, regardless of whether you looked at the datasheets for your components. Designing your board successfully will take some important steps when you begin your design. Aside from floorplanning and stackup design, your routing strategy will need to operate within some important PCB design constraints. After you capture your schematic as an initial layout and create an initial...

Low level components need ultra-stable power, and high speed digital signals need to have repeatable edge transition times. The two aspects of digital signalling are related, and you’ll need to suppress all aspects of power supply noise to reduce jitter in a digital system. During a design debug, you’ll need to gather measurements throughout your board if you want to isolate and eliminate sources of power supply noise. Here’s how you can isolate...

Single-ended transmission line measuerments are relatively simple compared to coupled transmission lines. You have half the number of ports, no parasitic to include, and of course, no phase sensitivity in driving to consider. Even-mode and odd-mode transmission lines couple capacitively and inductively, causing signals on the two lines to see impedance values that do not match the characteristic impedance, but this needs to be qualified for high...

There are plenty of noise sources in your PCB, ranging from thermal noise to EMI received from external sources. Phase noise is one noise source that occurs in analog signal sources like reference oscillators and frequency synthesizers. This type of noise affects the timing of analog signals and it arises due to contributions from other noise sources. If you’re debugging a high frequency board with a reference oscillator, then you might need to...

This 2 hour session will cover using Draftsman for design documentation, Fab/Assembly house file generation and automating their creation using Outjobs generation.

High voltage/high current designs carry safety requirements that need to be met by designers. Similarly, high-speed designs need to have suppressed crosstalk in order to ensure signal integrity. The key design aspects that relate to both areas are your PCB trace clearance and pad clearance values. These design choices are critical for balancing safety, noise suppression, and manufacturability. The IPC 2221 voltage and spacing standards provide...

What does PCBA too hot mean? It's a common question from designers, particularly new designers that are learning about industry standards, and refers to the PCB via current-carrying capacity of conductors. Trace and via current-carrying capacity are legitimate design points to focus on when designing a new board that will carry high current. The goal is to keep conductor temperatures below some appropriate limit, which then helps keep components...

Amplifiers are one of those critical components that make modern life possible. From wireless communication to power electronics, amplifiers need to run stably and predictably for these products to work properly. Stability analysis is one of my favorite topics in physics and engineering, and it always tends to crop up in places you would least expect. One of these places is in amplifiers. Any time-dependent physical system with feedback and gain...

If you’re an antenna designer, then you’re likely familiar with all aspects of near-field vs. far-field radiation. Given the litany of radiated EMI problems that cause noise within and outside of an electronic device, one might suddenly realize their new product is acting like a strong antenna. To understand how EMI affects your circuits, it helps to understand exactly how near-field vs. far-field radiation from your PCB affects your ability to...