Award for printed circuit board (PCB) design

Gage Applied Technologies has won a Mentor Graphics' PCB technology leadership award for the printed circuit board they designed for a family of high-speed digitizers.

Continuing its tradition of promoting and recognising printed circuit board (PCB) designer excellence, Mentor Graphics held its 19th PCB Technology Leadership Awards Contest.

The contest showcases the achievements of engineers and PCB designers who use Mentor's technology applications to design complex PCB systems.

This year's contest showcased a record number of submissions from countries around the world, including Germany, Switzerland, China, Norway, Singapore, Austria, Canada, Korea, India, Israel, Portugal and the United Kingdom.

Gage won the Industrial Control, Instrumentation, Security and Medical category for the printed circuit board they designed for a new family of high-speed digitizers.

Gage's next generation of high-speed digitizers won for the complexity of its design, which is by far one of the most complex developed by Gage to date.

PCB design is a very critical component at such high speeds.

Trace matching, controlling impedance, and differential pair matching requirements are some of the design challenges Gage engineers and designers faced.

The complexity of the routing, combined with signal integrity and grounding issues, were such that our simulation and design tools were utilised to their fullest extent.

Extensive testing and simulations were performed to validate each design step.

The board is comprised of 12 layers with split and mixed signal planes.

A split/mixed stack up design was used to optimise and meet the opposing needs of the analog and digital sections.

A split plane and routing strategy was defined in order to reduce cross-talk between analog and digital signal domains.

The design also has layer restrictions, class rules, trace length rules, differential pair rules and trace width per layer rules for controlled impedance.

Plane cutout areas and copper/trace keep-out areas were also a necessity for different design requirements.

Component height restrictions, component free areas, heat sinks, custom shields and high-density component packages are some of the physical challenges Gage engineers and designers faced.

Mentor Graphics design tools allowed the Gage team to efficiently design its latest complex family of high-speed digitizers.

"Without these tools, manual routing of the CLK signals, differential pairs, and high-speed signals would have been very difficult and time consuming," said Chantal Holloway, Gage PCB Designer.

"Given the complexity of this project, Mentor's design tools allowed us to achieve desired results quickly without impacting the schedule", Holloway added.

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