Printed Circuit Design & Fab Online Magazine - Features

Features

Latest IPC-DPMX standard offers unique bidirectional data exchange between design houses and their manufacturing partners.

The authors of IPC-DPMX, previously known as IPC-2581, have come up with an innovative solution for addressing the needs of the industry for the latest version of the electronics data transfer standard. Developed for the industry by the industry, IPC-DPMX has many new enhancements. The just-released Revision C has been reviewed and unanimously approved by the PCB design, analysis and supply chain industry.

IPC-2581B introduced the concept of bidirectional data exchange between design houses and their manufacturing partners. It sought to eliminate the back-and-forth between partners at the very end of the design cycle for communicating and ensuring that critical net impedances were achievable. This communication was important earlier in the design cycle and impacted the layer stack-up, which is very hard to change at the end once design is complete and handed off. Although this innovation was unveiled almost seven years ago, it is still unmatched and unique within an open standard.

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As chiplet usage increases, chip-level concerns shift into the area of system-in-package implementation. Therefore, the system-in-package (SiP) must now accommodate electrical performance and cost considerations. A rapid prototyping tool flow that allows the engineering team to make quick assessments of these goals is essential.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade & Industry (METI) released the August production data from Japan.

We’ve come a long way since the first 3D-printed item came to us by way of an eye wash cup, to now being able to rapidly fabricate things like car parts, musical instruments, and even biological tissues and organoids.

Consider these alternatives for advanced PCB design and analysis.

These days, I try to keep up with interesting signal integrity discussions on forums, SI listservs, and LinkedIn. After reading a recent question about PDN models and parasitic extraction on SI-lists, I made the comment (paraphrased) that “S-parameters are overgeneralized.” Someone might rightly ask for clarification, and PCD&F seems the right forum to address this.

The point of the comment is this: S-parameters are not always the most conceptually satisfying mathematical tool – nor the only tool – for analyzing in every situation. Other designers might disagree with this and that’s fine; if you can garner important design insights from S-parameters, rather than some other parameter set, then so be it. My goal isn’t to knock S-parameters, but alternatives have more useful mathematical properties, or a more satisfying conceptual meaning, in certain situations.

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IC vendors should make edge rates easily available for inclusion in PCB design libraries.

PCB layout will eventually be fully automated. Although the effectiveness of automated place-and-route algorithms has declined over the years as designs became more complex, all the ECAD companies have been successfully automating other areas of the design process.

Now the age of artificial intelligence (AI) for ECAD has arrived. Jitx, DeepPCB, Luminovo and Celus already have design-related products using AI. Zuken, Mentor, Altium and Cadence have ongoing development projects applying AI methods. Many obstacles must be overcome. Yet an aspect of PCB layout is ripe for automation today, even without AI.

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