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The Shaughnessy Report: Winning the Signal Integrity Battle

When I first started covering this industry in 1999, signal integrity was the hip new thing in PCB design. Conference classes on signal integrity were packed to the walls, and an SI article was guaranteed to get a lot of reads.

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.

But the ’90s brought higher clock speeds and faster processors, and formerly minor problems like trace discontinuities and signal reflections. Impedance mismatches became dealbreakers. Standards were still catching up, and digital designers had to take a crash course in analog design just to survive.

Fast-forward to 2025. Today’s PCB designers have far more weapons to wield in their fight for SI than in 1999. IPC design standards provide a roadmap for most high-speed designs. Material manufacturers now offer a low-loss material for almost every situation, and PCB layout, analysis, and simulation tools are geared toward users who are facing SI challenges.

That’s a good thing, because almost everything on a board is faster, smaller, and more complex than it was a few decades ago. As the saying goes, “If you don’t have signal integrity problems yet, you will.”

This month, our expert contributors share a variety of design techniques that can help PCB designers and design engineers achieve signal integrity. We start with an interview with Global Electronics Association instructor Kris Moyer, who shares his thoughts on how designers can defeat “the bounces” and win the SI battle. Columnist Barry Olney explains how PCB designers can defeat the “villains” of SI, including the “Via Vandal” and the “Parasitic Phantom.”

John Watson continues this theme with a column that compares SI challenges to a military obstacle course. Stephen V. Chavez gives an overview of the state of signal integrity techniques today. Al Neves discusses his fight for SI with his staff of engineers that he has dubbed “SEAL Team Six of Signal Integrity,” and columnist Kelly Dack explains how proper stackup design can help designers achieve SI. We also have a column by Matt Stevenson, articles by Anaya Vardya and Kirk Fabbri, plus a great article by Padmanabha Shakthivelu and Nico Bruijnis of MacDermid Alpha Electronics Solutions.

It's now September, and we’re heading into trade show season. We’ll see you on the road!

This column originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of Design007 Magazine.