Layout & Routing

Fighter pilots have long trusted highly sophisticated automation. That’s how you can meet the challenges posed by advanced PCB design techniques.

Decoupling capacitor counts are increasing as PCBs deploy more advanced silicon. But you can use automated analysis to bring counts and costs under control.

Early use of design for manufacturing can capture PCB yield issues related to pads, copper distribution, same net slivers and more

Speeding up electronics design by learning lessons in increasing parallelism from computer science.

Advanced PCB and IC technologies have to be matched with advanced design and analysis tools if companies are going to produce board designs that are right first time, on time.

The earlier in a design cycle a decision can be made, the shorter the development time and the lower the development cost. This is probably the most important product development principle, and is especially true when interconnects are not transparent and signal or power integrity could be holding back performance. You must find, fix and […]

Length matching within a differential pair can be one of the more tedious tasks facing a PCB designer. This article describes how a team at communications and consumer electronics semiconductor company Broadcom overcame this by using the automation options available within their design tools. While the article describes automation tailored to a specific task, the […]

This special edition of EDA Tech Forum Journal concentrates on PCB design. It’s an exciting area technologically right now, and we hope that the editorial content reflects that. One theme that kept emerging was that many of the contributors believe their discipline is at some sort of tipping point. And these changes don’t just come […]

Emerging technologies and markets could spur PCB tool growth despite economic concerns, says Mary Ann Olsson The worldwide PCB EDA software market maintained fairly stable 3.4% growth in 2007. Sales reached $532.5M, from $514.7M in 2006. The projected growth rate for PCB software in 2008 is 2.3%, bringing sales to $544.7M (Figure 1). One key […]

What impact do HDI via structures have on PCB design metrics? Andy Kowalewski describes a recent experiment. A PCB’s density has traditionally been seen as a function of the trace and space geometry and the number of signal layers. Emerging technologies such as microvias and buildup fabrication may force us to rethink this formula. In […]