PCB Systems Design Blog

While recording a how-to video about placing parts on a schematic, one part is showing off the hyperlink to the datasheet.  That is moderately cool in the hardware designer circles, but what happened when I clicked the link was beyond cool.  To see the whole picture, I have a Windows-Dell and a MacBook Pro next to each other on my desk.  I use virtual machines (VM) to keep all the various flavors of … Read More

Last week at DesignCon 2013, I provided an Analysis Anchored to Reality presentation of the highlighting and validating the new features of HyperLynx 9.0. Teledyne LeCroy, Molex, CCN, and Picosecond Pulse Labs partnered with us to provide measurement equipment, hardware to test, and a pattern generator for this demonstration. We started off with a correlation study so customers could see that the analysis … Read More

The Mentor Graphics support group has been busy this past year creating several webinars and support videos on DxDesigner.  If you’re subscribed to the SupportPro Newsletter, you may have noticed eight new videos posted from our support team on using DxDesigner. These videos are also available at this link: http://supportnet.mentor.com/reference/tutorials with your SupportNet account. SupportNet Recently … Read More

Inventory Accuracy

Over the past 16 years I’ve had the pleasure of being part of the development of HyperLynx and am excited about the latest release, HyperLynx 9.0 as we are simultaneously celebrating its 25th birthday and 10th year with Mentor Graphics. HyperLynx was founded in 1988 when cell phones were the size of a lunch box, FPGAs were just hitting the streets with a Xilinx 2064 touting 64 logic cells, VHDL and … Read More

I’ve spoken with several customers recently who have, or are in the process of transitioning from PADS Logic to the new DxDesigner. Their reasons were consistent: they needed a component information system, or analog simulation, and/or their designs were getting more complex and need a more robust hierarchy. Does this describe you? Now may be the time for you to consider the move to DxDesigner. Take … Read More

Layout and Routing

Have you written a macro and want to execute it quickly and easily with a custom defined shortcut key?  That’s easy to do in PADS!  Application Note MG579433, written by Bill Tkachuk and Todd Hendren, give you step-by-step directions on how to record a macro, then assign it to a shortcut key of your choice. You can find the app note at https://supportnet.mentor.com/reference/appnotes/index.cfm?id=MG579433 Jim … Read More

A few weeks ago I was visiting a nearby customer to demonstrate the powerful ELDO SPICE simulator as an add-on to our HyperLynx Analog simulation lauchpad. To navigate through the schematic, I clicked on the arrows I use for links on the cover page to jump to the page for simulation. After the demo was complete the customer asked me, “You clicked on an arrow on the table of contents page and ended … Read More

Schematic Design, SPICE

After years of pooh-poohing AMD, Intel had to admit you could get more data throughput switching to a high-speed serial approach. Let’s say high-speed serial is in the 1 to 10 Gbps range per lane, and use PCIe as an example. This is where the benefits become irresistible and the behavior becomes unexpected according to the previous rules of layout design. The PCIe specification helps define the different … Read More

PCI Express, RF, differential

If signal integrity engineers had the power to make their jobs as easy as possible, every signal in an electronic device would have its own coaxial cable to connect driver to transmitter.  But then electronics would be the size of buildings again and certainly wouldn’t fit in your pocket.  So instead, we try to cram as much stuff as possible onto a little PCB and make it work at 100s and 1000s … Read More

stitching via

One of the nice things about newer, faster busses like DDR3 and DDR4 is on-die termination.  They are nice because you don’t have a bunch of components clogging up your routing layers, and I would say more importantly, it limits your required layer transitions which can help make your boards quieter.  So take advantage of the fact that you don’t have to route out to a terminator and try … Read More

In the past I have blogged about crossing splits in reference planes.  This is probably the most glaringly obvious of reference plane changes, and will of course result in radiation from the signal.  But another type of reference plane change which is more common, and usually much less avoidable, is when a signal transitions layers through a via.  In such a case, the reference planes will change and … Read More

DDR3, DDR4, SERDES

This Tip is Shared by Yan Killy, Technical Marketing Engineer There are technology and fabrication reasons why designers on occasion need to change the width of a trace during interactive routing.  In PADS, you can easily accomplish this with settings in Design Rules and the use of Modeless Commands. Using Design Rules you set can up the trace width range for all nets or one net in particular. In … Read More

Traceability, Layout and Routing

Much of the your end PCB product costs can be directly influenced by the parts selected up front during the schematic capture phase of the design process. When you incorporate information into the designer’s part selection interface such as preferred part status, compliance, and/or obsolescence, you can reduce the work and rework of designs thus saving you additional costs. Today, it is a challenge … Read More

Short for Web-based seminar, a presentation, lecture, workshop or seminar that is transmitted over the Web.   This week the DxDesigner team completed a series of 4 webinars with the following titles: Unleash the Full Power of Your PCB Design Software Tools Is Your PCB Engineering Team Collaborating Efficiently? Scalable Design Creation Technology for Your PCB Design Flow Reduce Product Costs with … Read More

Since FPGAs, field programmable gate arrays, are in their very nature fluid and changing, how do you force them into your electronics design techniques that all assume fixed parts?  Hardware design uses, well… hardware, physical chips and resistors that have fixed functionality.  We pull parts from libraries, wire them up, lay etch and build the gizmo.  FPGAs throw out the definition of hardware … Read More

FPGA