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PCB Routing
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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Identifying Minimum Trace Spacing and Track Width in PCBs with Altium Designer
Taking the time to set up routing rules to govern the minimum trace spacing and trace width for PCB 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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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Build High Density Interconnect PCBs with Skip Vias
All high-density PCBs rely on specific via styles to make connections into the inner layers without taking up space for routing. This is always driven by the components used in the PCB, namely fine-pitch BGAs with many high pin counts. One of the options for routing into inner layers as part of fanout routing is to use skip vias. Type-I HDI stackups will include skip vias as part of their routing options in an attempt to avoid the use of buried
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Increase Your Component and Trace High Density With Via-in-pad Plated Over Technology
I’ve got this awesome four-speaker stereo system with a subwoofer in my apartment that my neighbors love to hate. As much as I enjoy listening to music on this thing, the only part I hate is the mess of audio cords that hide behind the speakers. The last time I tried to clean behind my system, I nearly ripped out some of the audio cords. If only routing my high density of audio cords was as easy as routing traces on an HDI printed circuit board
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