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 PCB Design Challenges: A Package Designer’s Perspective The challenges faced by the PCB designers of today are significant. If we examine the breadth of designs, we find ever-increasing data rates and more high-speed signal routing that drive additional challenges meeting signal-quality requirements, including reflection signal loss and crosstalk issues. At the same time, designers are being asked to complete designs in shorter cycle times and in smaller form factors. They must come up with new and more complex routing strategies to better control impedance and crosstalk. Manual implementation is often time-consuming and prone to layout errors. |
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 Beyond Design: It’s a Material World Years ago, when clock frequencies were low and signal rise times were slow, selecting a dielectric material for your PCB was not difficult; we all just used FR-4. And we didn’t really care about the properties of the materials. However, with today’s multi-gigabit designs and their extremely fast rise times and tight margins, precise material selection is crucial to the performance of the product. Materials used for the fabrication of the multilayer PCB absorb high frequencies and reduce edge rates, and that loss in the transmission lines is a major cause of signal integrity issues. But we are not all designing cutting-edge boards and sometimes we tend to over-specify requirements that can lead to inflated production costs. |
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 Managing the Challenges of Flex and Rigid-Flex Design PCB designers working with flex or rigid-flex technology face many potential risks that can derail a project and cause costly design failures. As the name implies, flex and rigid-flex designs comprise a combination of rigid and flexible board technologies made up of multiple layers of flexible circuit substrates, attached internally and/or externally to one or more rigid boards. These combinations provide flexibility for the PCB designer working on dense designs that require a specific form factor. Rigid-flex allows the PCB design team to cost-efficiently apply greater functionality to a smaller volume of space, while providing the mechanical stability required by most applications. |
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 Ventec Keeps 'Shaking Things Up' with tec-speed 20.0 At the EIPC summer conference, I-Connect007 Publisher Barry Matties caught up with Ventec Europe & Americas COO Mark Goodwin, who provided an update on Ventec’s new products, the current state of the company, and how Ventec is shaking things up in the materials marketplace. |
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