TLA 2010 – Showcase Your Designs!

TLA 2010 – Showcase Your Designs!

The 2010 annual Technology Leadership Awards competition for PCB designs is cranking up this week. It’s a great opportunity to showcase your latest work and compete against designs from across the electronics industry and around the world.

Find out more about the competition, see who won last year, check my blogs for details on the winners.

GE Fanuc - 2009 PCB TLA military & aerospace category winner

Like all good projects, I started blogging about the winners of the 2009 competition, but never finished. I owe it to the winners to cover them all. This one’s about GE Fanuc – the winner of the Military & Aerospace category.

Design team: Nigel Knighton, Dave Shield, Stuart Connolly, Jim Rose, Zeshan Hussein

End product use: System blade for radar, sonar, signal intelligence & image processing

Stats:

Design challenges:

• Design for…signal/power integrity, cost, manufacturability and reliability
• 3+12+3 HDI stack-up
• 22000+ pins; 4500+ components
• Tight placement that achieved SI & thermal constraints (memory placed back-to-back to achieve DDR2 routing requirements)
• 80% high-speed nets
• Serial I/O signals running at 3.125GHz with a period of 320ps

Design tools:

• Used the Expedition Enterprise flow, along with an interface to SolidWorks for mechanical CAD and FloTherm for thermal analysis.
• All the signal length requirements where entered in the form of delay formulae to ensure compliance with the rules.

Judge’s comments:

• “One serious mother of a circuit board, well designed with an intelligent layer stack-up intelligently used.”

Design images:

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