Compete with fellow PCB designers for Mentor’s Technology Leadership Awards

Compete with fellow PCB designers for Mentor’s Technology Leadership Awards

Mentor Graphics created the Technology Leadership Awards competition over 20 years ago to enable PCB designers to showcase the complexity and inherent beauty of their work, and talk about the challenges they overcame. PCB design continues to be a major challenge, but those challenges have evolved with the complexity of the products being built.

 20 years ago…

• Almost all designs used plated-through-hole vias – the era of blind/buried vias, then microvias was still a few years away.
• Double-sided placement was becoming typical.
• Through-hole devices were the norm. The combo of through-hole vias and pins with double-sided boards significantly limited the routing density possible and increased layer counts.
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• The notion of ‘high-speed’ signals was just beginning and was limited to less than 5% of the nets on a board.
• Fabrication and assembly processes allowed for loose constraint tolerances.
• Anything but standard rigid boards was an anomaly.
• Of course anyone designing ‘hybrid circuits’ back then might contest these characterizations, but there’s a reason they were called hybrids.

 Previous TLA competitions have created a treasure-trove of design data and trends, which I’ll explore in future blogs. Click here if you want to know more about the TLA competition.

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