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RF PCBs can be complex boards that need careful interconnect design and layout. If you’re designing an RF PCB for microwave or higher frequencies, controlled impedance routing should be top of mind to ensure signal integrity. You can choose from many routing styles, but whichever routing style you choose, it should provide isolation against noise and crosstalk. A coplanar waveguide routing style is an excellent choice for RF PCBs as they can be...

One term that gets thrown about in RF PCB design topics is the use of a balun, but it can sometimes be unclear what these devices do or why they’re needed. In RF PCB design, there is sometimes a need to impedance match and convert between balanced/unbalanced signals simultaneously. This is where a balun comes in handy. If you’re wondering what is a balun in more detail, keep reading as this can be a rich topic. Some descriptions of baluns can be...

Whether you’re just getting acquainted with high bandwidth interconnect characterization or you’re getting familiar with the new IEEE P370 standard, 2x thru de-embedding will likely become a greater part of daily life for signal integrity engineers. The 2x thru structure is a standard test structure for interfacing between test connectors and a DUT for VAN measurements with the goal of extracting S-parameters or impedance measurements from high...

Whether you are an individual designer or a team of people, there are always others in the value chain that you rely on to turn your design from intent to reality. Making this happen means you have to collaborate and share. One of the problems is that the way this is done today can be cumbersome, error-prone and inefficient — we haven’t progressed much beyond phone calls and emails, until now. A decade worth of research and development with...

In all of our classes and consulting activities as well as the numerous articles we create, we always stress the importance of PCB documentation. Along with the PCB Fabrication Specification, this documentation is crucial to ensuring that a PCB is built right the first time and every time thereafter. Because the creation of this documentation occurs later during the design process, this step is given short shrift and/or not enough attention. When...

Judy Warner: Lawrence, you are working on a new groundbreaking Online Digital Experience that will further advance our focus on customer centricity; tell us about what this is and what it will mean for Altium users. Lawrence Romine: This is very exciting, Judy! As you well know, Altium’s success is built on our focus on the users of our products and services versus a classic value proposition aimed toward executive decision-makers. In our world...

New products are intimately designed to fit their enclosures, and getting the design right takes the right set of PCB design tools. When you can see your entire board, you can spot layout errors and component collisions and make sure your new circuit board will fit inside its enclosure easily. Now you can design and evaluate all aspects of your circuit board layout when you use the native MCAD tools in Altium Designer, a tool within Altium...

High-speed cluster computing, NVMe and SATAe, high-speed GPUs, AI in the data center and at the edge, 5G; they’re all using PCIe 5.0 to access computer peripherals. This standard and the upcoming Gen6 version of PCIe are pushing the limits of signal integrity for many computer systems designers, especially for systems to be deployed in a data center or edge environment. As with any high speed signaling standard, signal integrity is a major...

Banner image: The inductance and capacitance of a planar transformer design can be extracted from an ECAD file using the COMSOL software. Image credit: COMSOL. By far, the bulkiest through-hole component you can place on your PCB is a transformer. The only comparably large components I can think at the moment of our large high voltage capacitors, wire-wound inductors, some connectors, and heatsinks. Even small transformers take up more space...