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PCB Design

PCIe 5.0 slot motherboard

What Goes into PCIe 5.0 Layout and Routing? Here are some PCIe 5.0 layout and routing guidelines for your next high speed add-in card and motherboard to support PCIe 5.0 devices. Read Article

What is impulse response function Fourier transform

What are Impulse Response Functions? You can get a transfer function from a simulation, but what is an impulse response function? Learn more in this article. Read Article

The Importance of PCB Documentation

The Importance of PCB Documentation When it comes to real estate, it’s all about location, location, location. When it comes to ensuring a PCB will be built as designed, the emphasis is on documentation, documentation, documentation. This article describes the documents that need to be provided by the board design group to the fabricator, assembler, and test organization. Included is the description of the different drawings needed along with files and notes. All of these documents Read Article

Through Thick And Thin — How Do You Get High Current Into a High Speed PCB?

Through Thick And Thin — How Do You Get High Current Into a High Speed PCB? The typical large currents in today’s high speed PCB designs require a different approach. This article will describe the stackup requirements associated with these very large current PCBs and how to design them so that they can be readily manufactured properly. Read Article

How Vias Can Affect Very High-speed Signals

What Are PCB Vias and How They Affect High Speed Signals In a variety of articles posted on Altium’s resource center as well as in several other technical articles, papers, and conference proceedings, the advantages of differential signaling and its ability to deliver very high data rates have been touted. But, as with many things in life, those things that are beneficial can also have a downside. Such is the case with today’s products that deliver 32 Gbps and above data rates and the vias that are Read Article

A Short Tour Through The PCB Design Process

A Short Tour Through The PCB Design Process In several previous articles, I have addressed the PCB design process in terms of the tools involved, the basics of electromagnetic behavior on transmission lines, signal integrity, power delivery design and numerous other PCB design-related topics. But, one of the most important basics is to have a good sense of the factors that are considered to have the fastest design flow. This info spans the buses and types of signals including operating Read Article

Bandwidth Requirements For Differential Signals

Bandwidth Requirements For Single-Ended vs. Differential Signals This article provides an overview of the benefits of differential signaling and how it operates in a working electronic product. Read Article

The Switching Behavior Of A Series-Terminated Transmission Line

The Switching Behavior Of A Series-Terminated Transmission Line Series-terminated lines and differential signals serve as the links in all CMOS devices. While I have written extensively on differential signaling, its operations and its benefits, I have not addressed the switching behavior of a series-terminated line. That is the purpose of this article. The Basics The salient points about a series-terminated transmission line include the following: In this type of transmission line, a series termination is Read Article

Developing a PCB Testing Procedure for New Designs

Developing a PCB Testing Procedure for New Designs As noted in several of my previous articles, at Speeding Edge, we are big proponents of putting test structures into PCBs. The impetus for incorporating these structures covers a wide variety of topics—it’s a new design; you’re using new component technology; a new laminate or a new fabricator to name a few. There are many critical performance characteristics required of today’s electronic products. They operate at high frequencies, move enormous Read Article

Real-time PCB Component Traceability in Altium Concord Pro

Altium Concord Pro: Real-time PCB Component Traceability for All Requirements Altium Concord Pro^™ as a standalone product and brand name has been discontinued and the capabilities are now available as part of our Altium enterprise solutions. Learn more here. PCB designers and project managers in highly regulated industries face a number of obstacles when managing the design process and preparing for manufacturing. Aside from paying attention to industry standards, and performance requirements, and coordinating electrical Read Article

Modeling PCB Interconnects as Causal Systems

Modeling PCB Interconnects as Causal Systems Real PCB interconnects are causal systems and must be modeled with the correct time-dependent behavior. Read Article

How Multifunctional Hardware Teams Can Collaborate

IoT PCB Design: It's More Than Just Hardware Development Altium 365 makes IoT PCB design and coding easy. Share your designs, control revisions, and fork projects directly in Altium Designer or through Altium Concord Pro. Read Article

Pandemic PCB Prototyping: Building Electronics From Your Living Room

Pandemic PCB Prototyping: Building Electronics From Your Living Room It feels like everyone is writing an article these days about how they’re managing (or not managing) with stay-at-home orders due to COVID-19 restrictions. At the time of writing, California (where I am based) has the highest number of cases over any other state in the United States. To combat the pandemic, most non-essential businesses have been closed or open in a limited fashion. This means that folks who are able to work from home (e.g Read Article

The Benefits of High-Dk PCB Materials

The Benefits of High-Dk PCB Materials The terms “high-speed design” and “low-Dk PCB laminate” are often used in the same articles, and often in the same sentence. Low-Dk PCB materials have their place in high speed and high-frequency PCBs, but high-Dk PCB materials provide power integrity. Low-Dk PCBs are typically chosen as they tend to have lower loss tangent. Thus high-DK PCB materials tend to get overlooked for high speed and high-frequency PCBs. When we look at power integrity Read Article

PCB manufacturing trends interview

PCB Manufacturer Trends and Challenges with Summit Interconnect Learn more about PCB manufacturing trends from Clay Swain, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, and Gerry Partida, Senior Field Applications Engineer. Read Article

Your Office Network is Not Secure

Your Office Network is Not Secure Introduction A few years back, I was among the leaders in one of Italy’s biggest Hackerspaces. There was an unearthly atmosphere when a place meant to bring all sorts of folks together opened its doors for the first time. It reminded me of the internet-famous band 2Cellos. Their music is a mixture of classic, pop and metal covers, played on cellos with varying levels of distortion. They can swiftly escalate from harmonies of long-held soothing Read Article

Design data management system

The Search for the All-in-One Electronic Design Data Management System In this article we discuss the pain points of using a single design data management system over linking many together. Read Article