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Signal Integrity
SPICE: Certainty for All Decisions

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Signal Integrity

ground below inductor Should Ground Be Placed Below Inductors in Switching Regulators? Should you place a ground cutout beneath the inductor in a switching regulator PCB layout? This is an important question surrounding EMI/EMC, and we’ll investigate in this article. Read Article
skew sources high speed PCB Addressing Skew Sources in High Speed PCBs Sometimes, when we talk about skew, we aren't as specific as we should be. Most discussions of skew and jitter deal with the type of skew incurred during routing, namely due to length mismatches in differential pairs and fiber weave-induced skew. In fact, there are many different sources of skew that contribute to total jitter on an interconnect, and it's important to quantify these in serial and parallel buses that require precise timing control Read Article
Pin-Package Delay and Via Delay Pin-Package Delay and Via Delay in High Speed Length Tuning Take a look at the inside of some integrated circuit packages, and you’ll find a number of wires bonded to the semiconductor die and the pads at the edge of the component's package. As a signal traverses makes its way along an interconnect and into a destination circuit, signals need to travel across these bond wires and pads before they are interpreted as a logic state. As you look around the edge of an IC, these bond wires can have different Read Article
Guide to Using Ferrite Beads in a PCB Ebook: Guide to Using Ferrite Beads in a PCB Ferrite beads in a PCB are the stuff of myth, but there are legitimate uses for ferrite beads and other ferrite components. In this e-book, we’ll examine some uses of ferrite beads in a PCB, as well as other magnetics. Read Article
PCB copper roughness How Much PCB Copper Surface Roughness is Too Much? When we talk about copper roughness, we always bring it up as if it were a universally bad thing. The fact is, some circuits will always function just fine even if the copper is rough. As long as your traces are fabricated to spec in every other area, the roughness of the traces might not matter as long as your operating frequency or bandwidth are low enough. Just what constitutes “low enough” and when is the effect of roughness so small that we Read Article
PCB Copper Foil Types of PCB Copper Foil for High-Frequency Design Does your design need smooth PCB copper foil? It all depends on the frequency range you’re working in. Learn more in this article. Read Article
Transmission Line Impedance Calculator PCB Transmission Line Impedance Calculators We’ve compiled a set of transmission line impedance calculators for use in high speed PCB design and RF design. Read Article
Differential Pairs and Differential Signals What Are Differential Pairs and Differential Signals? Differential pairs and differential signaling are the mainstay of high speed digital communication and data transfer. Read Article
Mode-Selective Transmission Line Harness mmWave Routing with a Mode-Selective Transmission Line High frequency and data rate channels can be routed as a mode-selective transmission line. Here’s when you should consider this routing technique. Read Article
Parasitic Extraction with an Electromagnetic Solver in PCB Routing Parasitic Extraction with an Electromagnetic Solver in PCB Routing Parasitic extraction: the integrated circuit design community must grapple with this task on a daily basis, especially once gate features are reduced below ~350 nm and chips run at high switching speeds. The PCB community also has to deal with this idea in order to better design power delivery networks, interconnects with precise impedance, and properly quantify crosstalk and coupling mechanisms. There are many 3rd party applications that can be Read Article
Stripline impedance calculator Stripline Impedance Calculator Learn more about using and interpreting results from a microstrip impedance calculator. Read Article
Microstrip impedance calculator Microstrip Impedance Calculator Learn more about using and interpreting results from a microstrip impedance calculator. Read Article
Grounded coplanar waveguide digital signal Altium Live Question: Digital Signals in a Grounded Coplanar Waveguide? Have you considered the effects of a GPCW structure on digital signals? Here’s a hint: look at the S-parameters! Read Article
Mode conversion A Guide to Mode Conversion, Its Causes, and Solutions Differential pairs are most often discussed in terms of their impedance and length matching tolerance, both with the goal of ensuring proper termination at the receiver and suppression of common mode noise. On interconnects, such as board-to-board connections or cascaded transmission line arrangements, you have an important EMC compliance metric that is sometimes overlooked. This is mode conversion, which can be visualized in an S-parameter Read Article
Differential stripline impedance calculator Differential Stripline Impedance Calculator Try our differential stripline impedance calculator, built based on Wadell’s equations. Read Article
Differential Microstrip Impedance Calculator Differential Microstrip Impedance Calculator Learn more about using and interpreting results from a differential microstrip impedance calculator. Read Article
Capacitive load termination How To: Impedance Matching and Terminating Capacitive Loads Impedance matching and capacitive load termination are examined in this article. Read Article