With the increases in signalling speed, the industry has come to a point where designers need to understand way more about printed circuit board materials and fabrication in order to successfully design and specify PCB’s.
The faster signal speeds make copper roughness a real issue of discussion due to skin effect losses. Boards are routinely prototyped locally with mass production off-shore, which really stresses the need to specify and test what is really important. Glass fiber weave differences introduce skew in differential signals and trace impedance variations. Numerous trade-offs needs to be made between electrical performance, manufacturability, yield and cost.
Recent disasters like the Fukushima nuclear meltdown and the Thailand flooding alerted the world to dangers of single suppliers anywhere in the supply chain. With more specialized low loss materials being specified in board stackups, companies expose themselves to bigger risks. Understanding the material situation and second sourcing options are paramount to reduce this risk.
Challenges for the Designers
The expectations are on the designers to understand and design and specify board stackups that are both economically and technically well designed to work reliably in products based on modern high speed parts. To further complicate matters, the requirements for complex multilayer boards today are simply outside the skill set of most PCB fabricators today.
This course is designed to enable the participants to fully understand the complex field, to design efficient board stackups and to communicate this in a sensible way to both purchasing and fabricators.
I have convinced Lee Ritchey to do the new one-day stackup design course alone. Last time we had the course in Copenhagen, Rich from Isola was in charge of the first half of the content. He can’t make it to Stockholm this time, and I know Lee can do an even better presentation on this super important topic. So I really look forward to that.
BONUS: You save money if you sign up before April 2nd.
We really really prefer payment by credit card, but if you can’t or aren’t allowed to do that, see what to do.
Date: Jun 14th. Price: EUR 740
M.Sc.EE, SI Consultant