At DesignCon, I met up with Todd Westerhoff, product marketing manager for highspeed design at Mentor, a Siemens Business, to discuss common design profitability issues and cost-aware PCB design. He explains how simple problems can “slip through the cracks” and cause delays, what you can do, and how first-order analysis can make simulation accessible to designers who wouldn’t simulate otherwise.

Andy Shaughnessy: Tell us about how the “small stuff” can get you in trouble. You say that we, as designers, take care of the big challenges pretty well, but projects get held up anyway... More >

In last month’s column, I looked at why interconnect impedance is so important to the performance of our system. I also mentioned that impedance is defined in both the time and the frequency domains. In the time domain, we need to consider the impact of the interconnect impedance on the propagation of electromagnetic energy. However, in the frequency domain, the AC impedance needs to be kept below an acceptable level to prevent excessive radiation.

Decoupling capacitors are generally spread throughout the power distribution network (PDN). In the past, we thought that it was only necessary to add a few capacitors to each IC power pin to stabilize the power at that device... More >