Printed Circuit Design & Fab Online Magazine - Current Issue

Current Issue

Martyn Gaudion The evolution of layer stackups, from simple constructions to sequential lamination.

Stackup, the buildup of PCBs, has grown in importance over the past few decades. In the early days PCBs functioned primarily as interconnect, and the need for stackup was minimal. On a single-sided PCB, the “stack” is simply one piece of clad material. Even the board thickness was rarely a consideration unless it had to plug into an edge connector.

Read more: PCB Stackups: A Brief History

Takashi Ichikawa PCB engineers need more flexibility than all-or-nothing keepout rules.

Modern PCB layouts demand precise routing control. As board designs become denser and constraints become more difficult to manage, PCB engineers need more flexibility than all-or-nothing keepout rules.

Read more: Precise PCB Keepout Area Control with CR-8000

Sajeda Tamimi A progressive, automated verification approach enables engineers to analyze hundreds of high-speed channels in hours instead of days.

Most verification tools and workflows in the market today are designed to analyze only a handful of links at a time. This creates a dangerous gap: when you can verify only a small subset of channels, the chance is real you'll miss the specific links that have critical signal integrity issues. Traditional post-layout verification workflows simply don't scale when dealing with 100+ channels that require comprehensive compliance verification.

Read more: SerDes Verification with Hundreds of High-Speed Channels

Jeff Perry Reuse templates with confidence.

Complex PCBs change quickly as projects mature. This ongoing change can introduce design errors that lead to costly rework and delays. The Template Area Net Check in Design Force helps teams stay aligned through every revision by catching copper fill net mismatches between schematics and PCB design before they become problems.

Read more: Preventing Copper Net Mismatches with Template Area Net Check