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If you’re a designer of extremely high-speed PCBs or high-frequency RF devices, then you’ll be taking advantage of impedance controlled routing features in your PCB design software. These tools are designed to ensure the impedance of a transmission line is consistent along its length, thereby allowing termination at each end to prevent reflections. Consistent impedance also ensures consistent propagation delay along an interconnect, thereby allowing parallel high-speed PCB signals (such as in PCIe) to be accurately length matched to prevent skew ..read more

Your PCB substrate materials are a major determinant of many aspects of performance. In any real operating environment, you’ll need to make several compromises to ensure your next board operates as intended. The PCB substrate materials industry has spent a significant amount of time engineering PCB core and laminate materials with a variety of material properties, weave styles, bonding resin content, and dielectric properties. Anyone designing on a standard PCB substrate will have plenty of laminate and core material options for use in their next board ..read more

3D printing of large, complex objects like automobiles and rockets was once thought to border on the realm of science fiction. Today, serious companies are producing 3D-printed rocket engine parts and finished engines with lower weight and cost compared to traditionally manufactured engines. 3D printing capabilities now span beyond fabricating mechanical parts for rocket engines and include the production of fully-functional electronics ..read more

When only a small number of designs ran at extremely high speeds (<1 ns rise times), most designers did not worry so much about the fiber weave effect in PCB design and manufacturing. With low bandwidth digital signals and at low GHz frequencies, the effects of a loose fiber weave were generally too small to notice unless interconnects were very long. With longer rise times of ~5 ns, it would take anywhere from 5 to 50 ft. of interconnect length for sufficient timing skew/jitter to accumulate on an interconnect and lead to failure—something that would never be observed in practic ..read more

The trend in the electronics industry over the last 50 years has been one of continuous minimization, where more computing power is packed into ever-smaller footprints. Keeping up with Moore’s Law has driven miniaturization at the integrated circuit level, where transistors are successively miniaturized and densities are increased over time. However, this level of miniaturization has also happened at the PCB level ..read more

Whether you work on high-speed digital or high-frequency analog devices, losses and signal distortion are important performance metrics in these systems. In planar PCBs on rigid substrates, the industry is moving away from FR4 PCBs, and a variety of high-speed laminate materials are available with low losses and nearly flat dispersion. Despite the availability of these materials, reducing PCB insertion loss, which contains indicators about the discontinuities in a channel and reflections in mmWave interconnects, is still a real challenge ..read more

Mass manufacturing has made modern life possible for people around the globe. The need to quickly manufacture products in high volumes is not going to change any time soon, but the traditional production environment is not suitable for high-mix, low-volume manufacturing of complex products. This is especially true for a number of plastic and mechanical products that require significant investment in tooling ..read more

Additive manufacturing technologies have advanced to the point where 3D printing processes and systems have moved outside the laboratory and onto the factory floor. More than 90% of Fortune 500 manufacturing CEOs agree that additive manufacturing will play a pivotal role in their operations in the future, and we can expect greater use of these systems on the production line in a variety of industries. Designing additively manufacturable products is only half the battle—manufacturing engineers also need to consider how the additive manufacturing production line operates and how it ca ..read more

If you’ve bought a new electronic product in the last few years, the PCB inside the device is most likely a multilayer PCB. Devices with a microcontroller, WiFi, or other wireless communication capabilities, and displays all require at least four-layer PCBs. This ensures the board includes power/ground planes and at least one signal layer, ensuring a minimal level of power and signal integrity ..read more