Intuitive Stack-up Planning & Impedance Control

How do you intuitively engineer good impedance-controlled PCB stack-up and routing plans for each new design which meets all of their specific impedance control design requirements?

• Search on the Internet?
  

• Do hand calculations?
  

• Ask a friend?
  

• Always force the design into the same one or two because they worked in the past?
  

• Buy a costly and complex tool like Polar?
  

• 'Feel' the best solution
  

• Hire some 'expert' to do it?
  

Can you intuitively visualize and understand what it's doing and how to reliably use it?

How do you efficiently approach gathering the raw data to make the final choices?

As signal speeds increase, the shortcomings of materials (like FR-4) become critical. Dielectric constants aren't constant, resulting in dispersion. Loss increases and is frequency dependent resulting in signal degradation over longer runs. Gathering information on lots of materials, tabulating all the information at various frequencies along with the specific thicknesses available, selecting optimal materials, and adjusting stack-ups to compensate can be very time-consuming and error-prone.

In this video, we will intuitively show you how various elements of a PCB's structure and routing affect the electromagnetic fields and turn the couplings, energies, and characteristic impedance of traces on it. Practical suggestions, methods, alternatives, and solutions will be discussed.

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