Dan Beeker: Outstanding in his ‘Fields’

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Andy Shaughnessy: Dan, I understand your class was packed. Tell us a little about the class.

Dan Beeker: This was my first time teaching a class on the free day at PCB East, and that was pretty exciting. Mine was the first class of the day, and that can sometimes be a little scary because people might not come, but I ended up with a pretty full class. The class was focused on the behavior of electromagnetic waves. We’re talking about a very simple perspective on wave theory and electromagnetic field theory. I put together a series of slides that explained what fields are, how you contain them, and how they behave in those structures.

My favorite analogy for electromagnetic field theory is the idea of plumbing. In water pipes, you have something stored in them, much like the energy stored in the space between a trace and a ground. That's the basic structure: Discreet conductors separated by a space. This is different from the ideas in the past that a blob of power vias does something and a blob of ground vias does something else to the fields. A blob of power vias or ground vias doesn't help you deliver energy. Each blob is made up of the same conductor. If you put power and ground vias together, then each of those discrete spaces follows the rules, and energy can be stored in those spaces.

It takes time. When you turn on the faucet for your hose, the water doesn't come out instantly. The water takes time to travel, and the same thing is true with energy, which travels at 6 inches per nanosecond in a PC board. The energy has no idea what's at the other end, so it just goes full bore till it gets to the other end, and then it behaves based on what's at the end of the pipe. If the pipe is connected to another pipe, it flows into the new pipe (the switch there is turned on). If there's a machine there (i.e., something that wants to use that energy, such as a motor, a light bulb filament, or a speaker), then that energy will be converted from an electromagnetic field into kinetic energy.

To read this entire conversation, which appeared in the August 2024 issue of Design007 Magazine, click here.