All Systems Go

November 17, 2022

All Systems Go: Auto-Detecting Over- and Under-Derated Parts

There are many reasons why a design may fail in the field. How painful would it be if it turned out that a catastrophic failure was caused by a one-cent part, such as an innocuous resistor that was stressed beyond its specified operational parameters? If a product does fail in the field, the costs associated with identifying and remediating the problem can be significant, not least in loss of reputation for the creators and distributors of the device. If only a 1.25-cent resistor had been used in this specific portion of the circuit, thereby saving time, money, resources, and reputation. Taranjit Kukal and Nitin Bhagwath co-host this month's column.

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August 23, 2022

All Systems Go: Time Traveling to 2030 for ML-Augmented PCB Design

In our previous column, 'Accelerate Your PCB Designs with Machine Learning,' we explained how artificial intelligence (AI) is an umbrella term embracing technologies that empower machines to simulate human behavior, while machine learning (ML) is a subset of AI that allows machines to automatically learn from past data and events without explicitly being programmed to do so. As ML systems become increasingly complex and capable, the distinction between AI and ML is becoming increasingly blurred.

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July 06, 2022

All Systems Go: Accelerate Your PCB Designs with Machine Learning

Even though we hear the terms artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) almost daily, there’s still a lot of confusion about the actual meaning of these designations. In a nutshell, AI is an umbrella term embracing technologies that empower machines to simulate human behavior. ML is a subset of AI that allows machines to automatically learn from past data and events without explicitly being programmed to do so. So, how do these play into PCB design?

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June 07, 2022

All Systems Go: Can You Design Without Electronic Data Management?

For any sizable design, PCBs are usually designed by a team of multiple design engineers (EEs) creating the schematic and multiple layout designers placing all the parts on the board and routing the traces. These teams often work with an extended team of experts in the supply chain, signal integrity, and mechanical and thermal analysis. Engineering management also has a stake in the design process, as it monitors design progress, resources, and scheduling. For a successful design, this multitude of interactions requires mandatory mechanisms to keep everyone on the same page during the design process.

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April 21, 2022

All Systems Go! Supply Chain Woes—Which Comes First, the Design or the BOM?

In an ideal world, when developing a printed circuit board (PCB) for an electronic product, decisions made during the design process should drive the bill of materials (BOM). We may think of this as an example of “the dog wagging the tail.” In the real world, however, there has always been some small amount of the BOM driving the design, which we may think of as “the tail wagging the dog.” A classic example of this is when an engineer’s calculations indicate the need for a resistor of 123 k?—a 40-cent part—while a 120 k? resistor—available for only 4 cents—will provide an almost identical response.

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March 17, 2022

All Systems Go! Find and Fix Thermal PCB Problems Sooner Than Later

In an earlier column titled "Bridging the Gap Between Design and Analysis with In-Design Analysis," Brad Griffin discussed how the “shift left” that’s happening with electronic design means it is no longer sufficient for signal integrity (SI) and power integrity (PI) analysis to be performed in isolation. Designing, analyzing and verifying the design in its entirety is key. Another facet of this shift left is the need to address thermal integrity (TI) sooner rather than later. In other words, finding and fixing thermal PCB design issues early in the design process is necessary to save costs, reduce design spins, and maintain your own sanity.

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February 17, 2022

All Systems Go! Ensuring Power Integrity—Explore, Design, and Verify

When designing an electronic system, ensuring power integrity (PI) is all about making sure that the power you are putting into the system via the voltage regulator module (VRM) reaches the downstream components in an efficient, sufficient and stable manner. In the not-so-distant past, ensuring the PI of an electronic system was a relatively simple and pain-free task. Many products involved a single PCB populated by readily available off-the-shelf ICs, such as the classic 7400-series devices from Texas Instruments. For the purposes of PI, these ICs, which were presented in low pin count, coarse pin pitch packages could be treated as closed boxes represented by simple power models.

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January 20, 2022

All Systems Go! Bridging the Gap Between Design and Analysis

Electronic designs are increasing in capacity, complexity, and performance. This is coupled with increasing pressure to get new products to market as quickly as possible while, at the same time, ensuring that these products are robust and will not fail in the field. The only practical way to address all these diverse requirements is to make design and verification tools and methodologies more powerful, intuitive, and easier to use. In-design analysis provides a way forward.

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January 06, 2022

All Systems Go! Meet Power Delivery Requirements Upfront with Power-First PCB Implementation

The drive for faster throughput, increased mobility, and maximum efficiency in modern electronic devices has made power delivery a critical piece of design success. However, meeting the power needs of modern designs is anything but simple. To achieve a robust design, each supply must be capable of delivering sufficient current to every dependent device. In addition, those supplies must be both stable (able to maintain narrow voltage tolerances) and responsive (capable of adapting to transient current demands). Identifying and resolving power delivery problems late in the design process is incredibly difficult. If design power requirements aren’t considered upfront, it can lead to schedule delays and a significant amount of debugging time in the lab. Implementing a power-driven, PCB layout methodology ensures the design process addresses critical power and signal integrity (SI) issues collectively at a time they can be easily solved.

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November 18, 2021

All Systems Go! Simulating Wirebonded CoB on Rigid-Flex

There are many good reasons to use a chip on board (CoB) implementation. When this is combined with wirebonding and the use of rigid-flex PCB, challenges mount. An application that demands all three—CoB, wirebonding, and rigid-flex PCB—is a camera module that goes into a mobile application, the sample design used to illustrate the design and analysis challenges in this article. If you are not aware of and prepared for the potential pitfalls, it is highly likely that your project could fall short or even fail.

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October 14, 2021

All Systems Go! Signal Integrity Signoff of 3D-IC Systems

3D-ICs meet the demand for integration of disaggregated system-on-chip (SoC) architecture built from multiple chiplets and heterogeneous architectures such as analog, digital, optoelectronics, and non-volatile memory.

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September 23, 2021

All Systems Go! Comprehensive Thermal Analysis of a System Design

In recent years, driven by the demand for smarter electronics, device designers have witnessed enormous scaling of large and hyperscale integrated circuits (ICs) and embraced development directions toward high density and reliability. These devices have increasingly higher thermal performance requirements—both transient and steady-state—and meeting them is becoming increasingly complex and time consuming.

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July 26, 2021

All Systems Go! Challenges in Analyzing Today’s Hyperconnected Systems

Today’s data-thirsty world is looking forward to the next-generation communication systems beyond 5G, the promise of massive connectivity to the internet with extreme capacity, coverage, reliability, and ultra-low latency, enabling a wide range of new services made possible through innovative and resilient technologies. The exponential growth in data speed and networking has introduced numerous design and analysis challenges across a system design. Design teams are challenged to deliver new, differentiated products faster and more efficiently, despite the ever-growing complexity of silicon, package, board, and software for many complex applications in the hyperscale computing, automotive, mobile, aerospace, and defense markets.

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June 24, 2021

All Systems Go!: Thermal Compliance of 3D-IC

In the packaging world, we have been designing heterogeneously integrated multi-chip products for decades. As we know, smaller process nodes enable higher frequencies and save on die area. However, for minimizing the system size, we need to use advanced packaging technologies.

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May 25, 2021

All Systems Go! Ensuring Signal Integrity of DDR5 Interface

The double data rate synchronous dynamic random-access memory (DDR SDRAM) has evolved from a data rate of 0.4 Gbps to the next generation, DDR5, scaling to 6.4 Gbps. With DDR5, we can achieve higher bandwidth using less power per bit transferred, enabling us to do more computing on larger data sets.

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April 30, 2021

All Systems Go! EM Analysis for Today’s System-Level Designs

There are two main reasons to do EM analysis: to see if the signals in the design will meet your performance specifications, and to see whether the design has unintended EM interactions in the circuit or system. Since domain-level requirements vary, not all EM solvers are the same.

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