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This article is from Chapter 2 of the eBook "The Printed Circuit Designer's Guide to...Thermal Management: A Fabricator's Perspective" authored by Anaya Vardya, CEO, American Standard Circuits, and published on iConnect007 here.

Recent studies indicate that the industry is nearing the precipice where plated through hole via technology has reached a limit in supporting serial links with 28 GHz Nyquist frequency requirements. At DesignCon2021, a team from the Mayo Clinic presented this paper about their work to extend the “life” of conventional PCB technology.

With the recent introduction of the Averatek Semi-Additive Process (A-SAP) process, linewidths under 1 mil are possible using the same fabrication processing line as for traditional 4 mil wide lines. This opens up the possibility of using narrower traces in the BGA escape region than in long-path routing regions. However, using this routing architecture means the narrower traces in the BGA escape field are at a higher impedance than the wider, 50 ohm traces in the routing region. So, how long can these traces be before the impedance mismatch is a problem? The authors of this piece propose an analysis methodology to find out.

If you have designed a controlled impedance transmission line based on a PCB stack-up, how do you know if the PCB fabrication house or another vendor built your stack-up to meet your controlled impedance specification?

Poorly designed interconnects can contribute to near field emissions, which is sometimes an indication of EMI failures, read on to see how to avoid failing an FCC test.

This article presents a quick and easy simulation model for filter performance analysis. The simulation model that the author built matches the test results quite well and it can serve as a useful and powerful tool for electronics design engineers.

“Over the years I’ve come to realize that, particularly in signal integrity, half-wave resonances are often the cause of ugly S-parameters. You can argue that any type of resonance would cause problems, and you would be right. However, half-wave resonances are easily formed in topologies.” This article summarizes observations from Gustavo Blando on the formation and mitigation of half-wave resonances, and includes an in-depth study on the topic in PDF format from the author.

How well do statistical models predict the behavior of real-world systems?  How can we make predictions about the likeliness and severity of worst-case system behavior?  In this article, the authors explain how they used a function generator and oscilloscope to collect varying population sizes of measurement parameter results in order to investigate the accuracy of a statistical model's predictions.

While eye diagrams and eye masks are both useful, they each hide as much information as they reveal. Read on to see how to get the most out of them for your design.

In this tongue-in-cheek experiment that leads to actionable conclusions, Ben Dannan and Steve Sandler set out to discover a method to mitigate the lack of an isolation calibration step on a VNA.