Multi-Board System Design


The last decade has seen extraordinary advances in printed circuit board design and fabrication. There has been substantial advances across design, from schematic entry to simulation to layout and routing to team collaboration and even to the way that manufacturing data is transferred to the fabricator. But there is one place where advancement has seemingly been stalled: the overarching system-... » read more

Avoiding The Barriers For Multi-Board Systems Design Development


Designing electronic systems that comprise multiple interacting boards, connectors and cables requires a multi-discipline team collaboration to effectively manage design complexity for optimum product performance and reliability. Multi-board systems may comprise two boards or up to hundreds of boards, packing a cabinet or rack, with interconnected connectors and/or cables. Since the hardware fu... » read more

Partitioning For Power


Examine any smartphone design today and most of the electronic circuitry is "off" most of the time. And regardless of how many processor cores are available, it's rare to use more than a couple of those cores at any point in time. The emphasis is shifting, though, as the mobility market flattens and other markets such as driver-assisted vehicles and IoT begin gaining traction. In a car, turn... » read more

Electronic Design Creation: Overcoming PCB Design Challenges


Think of all the parts that make up the human body: legs, hands, lungs, bones, muscles, and so forth. Yet we are more than mere parts and organs, more than materials and functions. We are human beings. If one part doesn’t work smoothly, all parts are affected. This paper describes how the principle of 'gestalt,' in which an entity is more than the sum of its parts, pertains to the process of ... » read more

The Evolving Thermal Landscape


Managing heat in chips is becoming a precision balancing act at advanced nodes and with advanced packaging. While it's important to ensure that temperatures don't rise high enough to cause reliability problems, adding too much circuitry to control heat can reduce performance and lower energy efficiency. The most common approach to dealing with these issues is thermal simulation, which requir... » read more

Have Margins Outlived Their Usefulness?


To automate the process of solving complex design problems, the traditional approach has been to partition them into smaller, manageable tasks. For each task, we have built the best possible solution which we continuously refine over time. Additionally, we have managed the interdependencies between tasks by defining boundaries or margins; these often have been best- and worst-case values used t... » read more

The Need For Speed: Strategies For Design Efficiency


Years of experience with one EDA tool obviously develops efficiency and makes you accustomed to the intricacies (good and bad) of your PCB design tool. However, with the development pace of today's technology, there comes a time when you need to consider a change to incorporate the latest methodologies. Reprinted with permission from The PCB Design Magazine, this article looks at productivity i... » read more

Enhanced Electro-Mechanical Collaboration


By Alex Grange and Linda Mazzitelli Integrating electronics into its mechanical environment comes with a number of challenges that boil down to Collision and Connectivity (does the cabinet bang against that capacitor?) and Synchronization (is mechanical designing to the latest PCB design and vice versa?). The culprit to problems that arise usually is the result of poor communications. Mod... » read more

Why Use A Package?


Subramanian Iyer, distinguished chancellor's professor in UCLA's Electrical Engineering Department—and a former fellow and director of the systems scaling technology department at IBM—sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the future of chip scaling. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Advanced packaging is being viewed as a way to extend scaling in the fut... » read more

3D Thermal Simulation Of Resistive Heating


Joule heating, also known as resistive or Ohmic heating, is the power lost to heat as electrical current flows down a conductor. We were introduced to Joule’s first law (Power dissipation = I²R, VI, V²/R) way back in high school. From an electronics thermal simulation perspective it requires a full 3D electrical flow simulation to be conducted, and from that the Joule heating power dissipat... » read more

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