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There is a little secret that most literature on PCB design will not tell you: every conductor in your PCB that carries an oscillating analog signal or a digital signal can act like a transmission line. Many prominent companies, including PCB manufacturers, are responsible for perpetuating the myth that transmission line effects only occur when the transmission line exceeds a certain length. In reality, this is not an all-or-nothing scenario...

Spotting some common PCB design mistakes will help get your board into production faster I’ll admit that I was not an excellent student until I hit graduate school. At that point, I started putting more energy into my homework than most other areas of my life. Sure, my social life became non-existent, but I soon became an exemplary student and I never looked back. Just like you need to do your homework while in school, you should do your...

As part of the sensor suite for autonomous vehicles, lidar range maps play an important role in object identification in the surrounding environment, alongside car radar and other sensors or imaging systems. Building a functional driver circuit with small form factor and sleek packaging is critical for enabling lidar imaging/rangefinding around a self-driving vehicle. These same circuits can be adapted to other lidar applications, such as...

Power integrity affects many performance aspects in PCBs, and ensuring power integrity in a digital design starts by ensuring the PCB layout has a low Power Delivery Network (PDN) impedance. There are several basic aspects of PDN impedance and some basic design steps that help a designer reach relatively low PDN impedance in a PCB. Without low impedance, power glitches can cause components in a board to operate incorrectly due to large voltage...

Simulations can help you avoid repeated prototyping and testing Design, build, test; whether you are a hardware designer or a software engineer, you’ll go through multiple iterations when developing complex systems. The build and test portions are the moment of truth—when you find out whether your hard work will pay off. An important part of design, build, and test iterations concerns narrowly defining test cases and functionality requirements...

Once upon a time, length matching guidelines for high-speed signals required a designer with enough skill to remain productive when manually applying different trace-length turning schemes. With today's advanced interactive routing features in modern PCB design tools, designers no longer need to manually draw out length tuning structures in a PCB layout. The remaining choice for a designer is deciding which length-matching scheme to use: trombone...

I often browse electronics and PCB forums, and I see the same question asked over and over: Why shouldn’t I route a trace over a split in my ground plane? This question gets asked by everyone from makers to professional designers who are just dipping their toes into high speed PCB design. For the professional signal integrity engineer, the answer should be obvious. Whether you’re a long-time PCB layout engineer or a casual designer, it helps to...