Valley Services Electronics

The PCB designer career field is projected to continue growing for the foreseeable future, and designers earn far above the average annual income in the United States. If this sounds like a career field that you would be interested in, keep reading. There’s a lot more to tell about becoming a PCB designer.

As signal speeds got faster on printed circuit boards, their potential for emitting or being victimized by noise and interference also increased. Many steps were taken to clear the signal’s pathways, including arranging the board stackup in microstrip or stripline configurations to achieve the best signal integrity. This setup protects sensitive high-speed signals from much of the noise and interference by routing them on a layer adjacent to a reference plane. Let’s take a closer look at microstrip vs. stripline layer configurations and how they may apply to your next design.

While your PCB layout will never be completely rid of parasitics, you can reduce parasitic capacitance in a PCB layout or take some steps to limit its effects on signal and power integrity. Whether you’re engaging with a PCB service bureau or creating the layout yourself, follow some guidelines to ensure parasitic capacitance does not cause your design to fail.

Electronic devices and systems rely on the clear and uninterrupted high-speed transmission of data within their circuitry. However, the signal transmission integrity can be degraded by both internal and external sources of electronic interference. It is vital to lay out the PCB to mitigate such degrading effects and ensuring the signal’s clear delivery. Here are some rules and techniques for signal integrity in PCB design that can help.

The resonance of a vibrating quartz crystal is often used in electronics to determine the oscillation frequency for timing signals in a circuit board. While there are different ways to create this timing, quartz crystals are well known for their effectiveness and stability. Like many other high-speed circuit board design aspects, the oscillator circuitry needs to be laid out with care to avoid signal integrity issues. Here are some crystal oscillator PCB layout guidelines that can help.

Personal computing devices, IoT, and many other embedded systems now require a diverse amount of electronics built onto one circuit board. These systems usually combine digital and analog circuitry running at high frequencies, creating many problems for circuit board designers if they aren’t prepared. Controlling signal and power integrity in a design is essential to avoid EMI problems that can ruin the device’s performance and cause it to fail its validation tests. Here are some PCB design rules for high-frequency layouts that can help.