PCB Routing

Browse our library of resources to learn more about pcb design and pcb routing.

Should You Use Your Power Plane as a Return Path? Power planes and ground planes are important for more than just distribution of supply and return power. When defining reference planes, both with impedance controlled routing and in managing return paths, your stackup might force return currents to pass into a power plane before being coupled back to a ground layer. Let’s take a look at some good practices for controlling return paths in your PCB with a power plane as a return path. Signal Read Article

Lies Your Fabricator May Have Told You In some of our previous articles, we have talked about the various things that go wrong when a board design is turned over to the fabricator for manufacturing. Sometimes, the things that can go awry are due to design errors but the bulk of them can be ascribed to errors incurred during the fabrication process. This article will describe the errors that can be encountered and what, if anything, can be done to avoid them. We have previously Read Article

Using Prepreg vs. Core for Controlled Impedance Routing Are you designing for controlled impedance on the right layer material? When I was first learning the finer points of PCB design, my first impression that the core was some type of special material that did not have close resemblance to the other layers. This is not necessarily the case, but designers need to work within the core/prepreg stackup constraints imposed by the PCB manufacturing process. Although you may be constrained as to how the Read Article

How the Fiber Weave Effect Influences High Frequency Signal Integrity The fiber weave effect can wreak havoc in networking equipment for copper and fiber When you look at any material under the microscope, it can feel like looking into another world. I spent many long hours on SEMs and TEMs comparing different materials and examining changes in optical and optoelectronic devices during operation. With new devices running at ever higher data rates, designs on rigid substrates need to accommodate one inconvenient Read Article

The Case Against Orthogonal Trace Routing in Multilayer PCBs Can you spot the orthogonal trace routing in this complex board? Neither can I... I occasionally see questions on forums, some blog posts, and even application notes that continue to recommend the use of orthogonal routing, usually in 2-6 layer boards. When looking at application notes, I tend to default to Rick Hartley’s advice and try to think about this advice in context. Unfortunately, recommendations in application notes are not always taken Read Article

The Fundamentals of High Speed SerDes Design High speed SerDes design goes far beyond computer peripherals The challenges in high speed SerDes design filter right down to the PCB level and are all about backplane/daughtercard design, transmission line layout, selecting proper equalization schemes, and much more. This even gets down to the fundamentals, where stackup and power integrity become critical when driving transmitters and receiver ICs. If you’re designing a PCB as part of a SerDes Read Article

Substrate Integrated Waveguide Routing for mmWave PCBs A substrate integrated waveguide acts similar to optical fibers The applications of mmWave signals used to be confined to defense, but now mmWave systems are becoming more common. You can thank car radar, UAV radar, upcoming rollouts of 5G, and current research on 6G for bringing mmWave technology into the mainstream. Routing with mmWave signals has forced designers to rethink their routing practices and interconnect designs. This has motivated Read Article

Parasitic Extraction with an Electromagnetic Solver in PCB Routing Keep your signals synchronized with parasitic extraction in your PCBs Parasitic extraction: the integrated circuit design community must grapple with this task on a delay basis, especially once gate features are reduced below ~350 nm and chips run at high switching rates. The PCB community also has to deal with this idea in order to better design power delivery networks, interconnects with extremely precise impedance, and properly quantify Read Article

PCB Bus Routing and Layout: The Basics Power supply on a network switch Modern computing simply wouldn’t be possible without PCB bus routing and layout. The same goes for many digital systems that manipulate data in parallel. If you’re working on a new PCB design and you need to route a bus between different devices, there are some simple rules to follow to ensure your signals aren’t distorted and that successive devices are triggered correctly. As some designers may question the Read Article

MIPI Physical Layer Routing and Signal Integrity MIPI physical layer routing (C-PHY) is typically used to connect these smartphone cameras to a processor. When most designers talk about routing standards, particularly for advanced devices, they typically refer to differential routing standards (e.g., LVDS) that enable high data rates. These signaling standards have proliferated computers, networking equipment, smart electronics, and other areas, and they have been critical for operating with Read Article

Patrick Züger Talks About the Altium Designer 20 New and Exciting Features Patrick Züger from GPV Switzerland, a massive fabricator and assembly facility across Europe and China, delivered a great talk at AltiumLive in Europe. He shares his feedback and design process with and as an Altium Designer® Beta User. We discuss his initial impressions of Altium Designer 20. Listen to the Podcast: Download this episode (right click and save) Watch the video: Show Highlights: As a CID+ Hardware/PCB designer in a global EMS Read Article

Plated Through-Hole Vias in mmWave PCBs Should you plate your through-hole vias in mmWave PCBs? Recently, I received a question from a designer at a startup wondering about proper use of plated through-hole vias in mmWave PCBs. It got me thinking that I neglected to mention this point in a previous blog post, although space in these posts can be limited. This is a fair question, both when dealing with microwave/mmWave frequencies, and when working with high speed digital signals. At Read Article

PCB Trace Width vs. Current Table for High Voltage Design Keep your board cool with our PCB trace width vs. current table Copper is a strong conductor with high melting point, but you should still do your best to keep temperatures low. This is where you’ll need to properly size trace widths to keep temperature within a certain limit. However, this is where you need to consider the current flowing in a given trace. When working with a power rail, high-voltage components and other portions of your board Read Article

1:3:28 Experience The New World-Class Interactive Router in Altium Designer 20 Altium Designer 20 ushers in a whole new era of possibilities and amongst them is a truly game-changing Interactive Routing Watch Video

Delay Tuning for High Speed Signals: What You Need to Know Length matched lines in a PCB Take a look at two signal readouts on an oscilloscope, and you can see how length/timing mismatches between signal traces can improperly trigger downstream gates. The situation becomes worse when we look at the travel time for a master clock signal and the roundtrip time for sent/received data in different computer interfaces. SDRAM has solved this nicely by placing a clock in the slave device and sending a clock Read Article

29:12 Altium Designer 20 - Key Features Sneak Peek Are you ready to meet the next generation of Easy, Modern, and Powerful PCB design? Watch this live webinar to Watch Video

Follow Your Multilayer Ground Return Path to Prevent EMI Make sure none of these traces crosses a ground plane gap Following the path back to ground can quickly become complex in a complicated multilayer PCB. When your PCB has a small layer count (e.g., a 4-layer board with two plane layers), it becomes rather easy to determine the return path and deliberately design it to prevent EMI. The situation becomes more complicated when you’re working with higher layer counts. Multiple plane layers and Read Article