During the dotcom boom, SI seemed a lot like black magic. Until then, PCBs ran at such low speeds, and rise and fall times were so long, that designers didn’t have to worry about “analogish” behavior. You could ballpark it and get away with it.
Today’s PCB designers have far more weapons to wield in their fight for SI than they did in 1999. That’s a good thing, because almost everything on a board is faster, smaller, and more complex than a few decades ago. As the saying goes, “If you don’t have signal integrity problems now, you will eventually.”
This month in the September issue of Design007 Magazine, our experts share a variety of design techniques that can help PCB designers and design engineers achieve signal integrity.