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PCB Routing

Stay Grounded: Digital, Analog, and Earth Ground in PCB Layout

All About Ground Reference and Chassis Ground in Electronics Design The concepts of grounding techniques, earthing, making PCB ground connections, and PCB chassis ground are all very convoluted in electronics, despite international standards that have tried to separate concepts and terminology. Grounding is important in every aspect of electronics design, electrical work, and of course, in PCB design. All circuits will need a reference connection, which is something that we call ground, but the exact reference is Read Article

Eliminate the Crosstalk: LVDS Routing and the Art of Differential Signaling

Eliminate the Crosstalk: LVDS Routing and the Art of Differential Signaling During a typical baseball game, coaches use the silent language of hand signals to instruct batters and baserunners while catchers use similar signs to recommend pitches to pitchers. Players in the outfield and the infield use hand signals to find the right locations when anticipating the skills of a batter. Electronics has its own version of a silent language with the variety of signals exchanged almost instantaneously within a circuit. Single Read Article

PCB Routing Tips: Navigating Your Way Through BGA Fanout Options

PCB Routing Tips: Navigating Your Way Through BGA Fanout Options Tom rose through the ranks of his company to become the new vice-president. He had worked hard, forged relationships, and consistently built his knowledge about the company. Unfortunately, Tom also contracted a serious disease called acronymitis that spread like the plague throughout key sectors of the company. Try as he might, Tom could not resist speaking in acronyms. Sometimes, his wife would hear him talking in his sleep—in acronyms Read Article

Termination Methods in High Speed and High Frequency PCBs

Termination Methods in High Speed and High Frequency PCBs The topic of termination will inevitably come up when dealing with high-speed digital systems. Most digital systems have at least one standardized high-speed interface, or possibly fast GPIOs that produce fast edge rate signals. Advanced systems will have many standardized interfaces which also have termination applied, normally on the semiconductor die. If you determine that you actually need termination, what method should be used? As it turns Read Article

PCB Trace Corrosion: Why It Happens and How to Prevent It

PCB Trace Corrosion: Why It Happens and How to Prevent It When most people drop their cell phone in water, they hurriedly dry off the outside of the phone, remove the battery, and toss the phone in a bag of rice. The myth goes that the rice draws water out from the inside of the phone, thus saving your phone’s the precious electronic circuitry, your wallet’s money, and your own sanity. What people don’t realize is that simply drying out your phone is not a solution. Water ingress can cause the device to Read Article

Determining Impedance with a Microstrip Line Calculator

Determining Impedance with a Microstrip Line Calculator Whether you’re new to PCB design or you’ve made your career out of it, there are many times in RF and high speed design where you need to design microstrip and stripline traces to have a specific impedance. This is done by adjusting the width of the line until the desired impedance value is reached. It's important to understand where impedance calculators are applicable as different calculators include specific assumptions on dielectric Read Article

Transmission Line Calculators in PCB Design

Transmission Line Delay Calculators in PCB Design Transmission lines are one of those deceptively complex things that make modern life possible. What seems like a simple metal cable is, in fact, a precisely engineered system. Traces on PCBs are no different, and they are like the blood vessels that power your electronic devices. So what is a transmission line anyway? This term was initially adopted to create the analogy between traces on a PCB and civilian power lines. The term “transmission Read Article

No Last Calls Here: PCI Express Routing and Layout

No Last Calls Here: PCI Express Routing and Layout Schematics The mere mention of the “Orient Express” conjures up images shrouded in mystery and intrigue. Spies often conducted their business during the 80-hour trip from Paris to Constantinople. Kings rode living and sleeping cars rivaled Europe’s finest hotels with wooden paneling, silk sheets, and deluxe leather armchairs. PCI Express does not have the same aura as the “Orient Express” but does allow the high bandwidth communication between devices Read Article

Crosstalk in Mixed-Signal PCB Traces and Ground Planes

Crosstalk in Mixed-Signal PCB Traces and Ground Planes Learn how to suppress mixed signal crosstalk and EMI in PCBs with the right ground and power plane arrangement. Read Article

PCB Component Failure: How to Workaround a Tragedy

How to Avoid PCB Component Failures and Workaround Them Probably, the single thing that drew me to pursue a technical career was the existence of laws that stipulated if you follow the same procedure then you will get the same results. I have always taken comfort in having that security for my work. However, there is another law that at times supersedes all others. That, of course, is Murphy’s law, which states “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” At times it seems that Murphy’s law applies Read Article

PCB Design Guidelines for Controlled Impedance Routing

PCB Design Guide to Controlled Impedance During PCB Routing In June 1831, Sir James Clark Ross discovered the North Magnetic Pole on the Boothia Peninsula in Northern Canada. While the term “discovery” seems to indicate that the North Magnetic Pole is static, the North and South Magnetic Poles, in fact, move continuously. The Earth’s magnetic field changes over time and as those changes occur, the positions of the poles also shift. Given the rate of movement at 55 km per year, we may have another meaning Read Article

Identifying Minimum PCB Trace Spacing and Width in Altium Designer

Identifying Minimum Trace Spacing and Track Width in PCBs Taking the time to set up routing rules to govern a PCB's minimum trace spacing and width for your layout can be tedious. Many designers would prefer to jump in and start trace routing without going through this setup process first. This can be dangerous though as you may inadvertently route a trace routing at the wrong width, or pack your routing in so tightly that you don’t have the room to make any width corrections later on. The more rigid Read Article

Use Interactive Routing to Mitigate EMI Issues from High-Speed PCB Traces

Use Interactive Routing to Mitigate EMI Issues from High-Speed PCB Traces Having a robot clean the house and perform laundry chores continues to elude modern technology given intricate steps to complete each chore. Given the repetitive nature of the chores, you’d think robotic automation would be the perfect application to turn over to a robot. It turns out that cleaning the house and doing the laundry is much more complicated and too advanced for robot understanding. Only simplistic chores, like vacuuming the floor Read Article

DDR4 routing guidelines

PCB Routing Guidelines for DDR4 Memory Devices and Impedance Follow these DDR4 routing and PCB layout guidelines to ensure signal integrity and correct timing for high speed DDR buses. Read Article

annular ring NFP

Annular Rings for PCB and Nonfunctional Pads: Should You Use ‘em or Lose ‘em? Annular rings placed as non-functional pads in a PCB can affect via strength and signal integrity. Learn when to remove or keep them in this article. Read Article

Auto-Interactive Routing to Overcome Obstacles and Other Polygons

Auto-Interactive Routing to Overcome Obstacles and Other Polygons There’s no doubt about it, routing traces on a printed circuit board by hand can be a lot of fun. It’s an engaging challenge to make the routing as neat, tight, and correct as possible to give you the shortest routes with the best signal integrity. Once you are done you can take a lot of pride in knowing that your measured lines are perfect, you differential pairs are spot on, and everything looks great. The only problem is that level of manual Read Article

Reduce Propagation Delay: Keep Your Logic Gates and Circuit Boards On Time

Minimize Propagation Delay in Logic Gates: Synchronize Pulse Trains When you have an analog watch, daylight savings time can wreak havoc in your personal and professional life. You might wake up and not even realize that you are an hour off schedule. No one wants to admit that they have fallen victim to daylight savings time, and your entire schedule has to resynchronize when this happens. Synchronizing your clock and your electronics components is critical in high-speed PCB design. Applications like bus trace Read Article