By Carlos Gazca Last year, I sat with Steph Chavez, the host of the Printed Circuit Podcast , and engaged in a conversation about design reuse. At the time I was working as an Application Engineer at L3Harris Technologies, but soon after I joined the Siemens team as a Technical Marketing Engineer. My background offers me a unique viewpoint as I have seen design reuse used differently and have learned what works and doesn’t work.  Understanding design reuse One of the primary

By Stephen V. Chavez Last year, on the Printed Circuit Podcast, I spoke with industry veteran, Scott Decker, about the use of PCB design constraints in PCB design. Decker has insightful knowledge on using design constraints as he has been working in the field of board design for 30 years, beginning his career using the Mentor tool in 1990 and spending the past 11 years working in Xpedition .  What is a PCB design constraint? In simple terms, a design constraint is a restricti

By Stephen V. Chavez Last year on the Printed Circuit Podcast I talked with Andre Mosley , a seasoned professional in the field of electronics design, about the critical aspects of managing electronic libraries and design data. This discussion shed some light on the foundational elements, best practices, and ongoing challenges we face in the industry today. Defining the foundation of electronics and electronic libraries Mosley began by clarifying a common misconception in the

By Andre Mosley When it comes to electronic systems design, I’m often asked what a robust library and design data management system should include. A centralized library and design data management system should cover the full spectrum of data utilized in developing individual circuit boards or multi-board systems connected by cables. The types of data can be broken down into four categories: Library models : Components, metadata, documents, and electrical models allowing for

By David Wiens The demand for high-speed and efficient RF (Radio Frequency) PCB design has never been greater. With billions of IoT devices expected to come online in the coming years, the necessity for RF design capabilities supporting ultra-fast 5G speeds is becoming increasingly apparent. The 5G revolution: why extreme speed support is crucial Several factors are driving the demand for extreme 5G speed support in RF PCB design. These include: IoT: the Internet of Things is

By Jim Martens The demand for electronics with gigahertz wireless technology, as well as IoT consumer devices have both increased dramatically. This has resulted in the subsequent increase of RF circuitry on designs, which will only continue as we move into the future. The unique design requirements of RF designs An engineer recently told me that their design only had about 10% RF circuitry on it, but that 10% takes up 90% of their design time to complete! This is because RF

High Density Interconnect (HDI) is being used more often to meet the growing need for more complex designs in smaller form factors. Beyond some of the more obvious electrical effects of using smaller vias, there is also an impact to the power integrity of a board using HDI. This includes different effects of mounted inductances of decoupling capacitors, changes in plane performance due to reduction in perforation from chip pinouts, and the inherent plane-capacitance changes f

Advancements in IC packaging manufacturing, combined with the exploding costs of designing monolithic ICs on today’s advanced process nodes, have given rise to a growing trend of disaggregating large SoCs into smaller dies and chiplets. This increased design complexity requires iterative multi-physics analysis during the floorplanning stage and optimization of the design for PPA and cost goals, significantly raising the barrier for project success. Trying to employ traditiona

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