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The Shaughnessy Report: Advanced, Complex, and Emerging Design Strategies

I’ve spent 24 years writing about PCB design, and there’s been one constant this entire time: Designers are an off-grid group of people. I know several people who live in RVs, and they’re all PCB designers. Designers are all a little unconventional. In fact, being off grid may be a requirement for success as a PCB designer. Some designers are really “out there.” They like to push the limits of their design abilities. They don’t like the status quo; they enjoy the challenges inherent in this job. They don’t shy away from new ideas, new materials, and new techniques. These designers look for ways to bend the laws of physics to meet their needs.

If I’ve just described you, you’re in luck. This month, in Design007 Magazine, we focus on designing PCBs with advanced, complex, and emerging technologies. We’ll talk about design strategies for boards that are on the cutting edge of technology, crazily complex, or so new that designers are still writing the rules as they go—like Wyatt Earp and his brothers taming a lawless cow town.

Albert Gaines kicks off this issue with a discussion about RF techniques and his work designing fragmented aperture antennas. Next, John Watson shares some of his strategies for designing tiny PCBs, which can bring, if not huge challenges, at least some trade-offs.

Kris Moyer points out that sometimes cavities aren’t a bad thing, especially when there’s a need to reduce board skyline. As the industry moves toward smoother copper, Martyn Gaudion focuses on modeling the effects of surface roughness on transmission lines. Vern Solberg explains how designers can take advantage of heterogeneous chiplet packaging. Barry Olney takes cavity design to the next level; he discusses methods for taming the electromagnetic energy that emanates outward in all directions from multilayer plane cavities. Tim Haag explains how he learned to design advanced circuit boards and he offers advice to inexperienced designers facing bleeding edge technology. Rick Ramos shares his strategies for designing and manufacturing wearable biosensors.

We also have columns from Joe Fjelstad and Jamin Wilson (a new contributor from Sunstone Circuits), and the final installment of a flex series by Mike Morando.

I hope you all are having a good summer. I’ll see you on the road soon enough.

This column originally appears in the July 2023 issue of Design007 Magazine