It’s no secret that placing passive devices in the proper location, whether it is nearer to the source/driver or the receiver/load pins, makes the difference between poor signal integrity and optimal signal integrity. Often this can be impacted by a breakdown in communications between circuit designers and PCB designers. Typically, the circuit designer has the [...]
You might have seen the recent news about Zuken incorporating Würth Elektronik’s design for manufacturing rules into CADSTAR. Today I want to tell you a bit more about our collaboration with Würth. If you’re a PCB designer, you’ll know that you need to define the correct layer stackups, design rules and materials from the manufacturer. These [...]
Last week I was over in the beautiful city of Dresden, Germany; involved in Zuken’s participation at the FED conference – arguably the most significant PCB event in Germany during the year. Apart from our annual conferences in Ulm and Hannover of course Masoud Raeisi and I were very busy manning our own Zuken booth, supporting [...]
This may seem a strange question for someone who’s made their living out of signal integrity for so long, but things have changed. There was a period in the 80s and 90s that I call the SI Deficit: the period when signal integrity issues took engineers by surprise and my specialty was even called “Black Magic”. The design landscape has changed radically since then – the main reason for this being standardization…
The importance and recognition of Signal Integrity (SI), Power Integrity (PI) and Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) in PCB design continues to grow. Just a few weeks ago I had one busy week participating in various seminars on signal integrity and EMI simulation. The first saw me flying to Oslo in Norway for the DNU Spring [...]
In the first part I covered just the bare essentials of why Low Voltage Differential Signalling (LVDS) is so popular. So what’s important about how these high-speed differential signals are routed, and why? I’m going to focus here mainly on PCI Express, but the differential routing considerations apply equally to other LVDS technologies and to differential [...]
