Items Tagged with 'stackup'

In this article, Kella Knack outlines the stackup process, highlighting the importance of taking material issues, structural issues, and performance factors into account from the beginning of the design process. Knack discusses how providing fabricators with proper design documentation that includes precise information enables them to build to specification, ensuring correct functionality while avoiding additional costs for design.

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?

Designing the right PCB stackup can make or break product performance. If the product has circuitry that is impedance and transmission loss sensitive, then paying attention to conductor surface roughness is paramount. Sometimes, however, the roughness of adjacent reference plane(s) is overlooked. If the adjacent high-speed signal layer uses smoother copper than one or both reference planes, a higher insertion loss than expected for that layer will occur and possibly cause a product to fail compliance. So, how is this determined before finalizing the stackup? Read on to find out.