At last, PCB designers are finally realizing the power they wield: They have the power to design profit into the board, or, conversely, increase costs and remove profit from the PCB. Mark Thompson reviews the challenges fabricators routinely face and presents typical DFP solutions affecting the bottom line.

To maximize performance improvements and ensure the success of advanced flex materials, new design and fabrication trade-offs must be understood by material suppliers, OEMs, and fabricators. This article represents collaboration between an OEM, a fabricator, and a material supplier with the goal of broadening flex circuits in higher-speed applications.

Dan Smith may have been sniffing paint fumes, but that didn't stop him from writing a letter to the editor after reading a recent "Shaughnessy Report". He asks, "What will it take to reestablish the U.S. PCB design community as a significant new product contributor? More education? Smarter tools? Intelligent factories?"

The challenge in designing a PCB stackup is to satisfy its many demands. Information in this article is drawn from Lee Ritchey's experience gained by designing more than 2,000 PCB stackups for products as simple as video games and as complex as the highest-performance backplanes used in supercomputers and routers

When we hear the term "controlled impedance" trace, our first confusion might come from this question: Why does a trace have any impedance at all? And if it does, what does it mean that we somehow control it? And how is it that a trace has a potentially significant AC impedance? In this column, Doug Brooks examines these issues and much more.

While RF purists may feel discomfort at the thought of using crosshatch as a high-frequency return, using crosshatched planes on flex and flex-rigid PCBs is a realistic method of keeping impedance-controlled traces at a manufacturable dimension and retaining the desired flexibility of the assembly.

Signal integrity engineers and EMC engineers look at the decoupling capacitor in different ways. This award-winning paper presented at DesignCon 2007 looks at decoupling from a time-domain and frequency-domain viewpoint.

The advantage of parallel design architecture is that it lets multiple designers work on the same design simultaneously without needing to partition the design.