Constraint Driven Flow

Parasitic capacitance and inductance can create major problems in your digital, analog, or mixed signal boards. Here are some design tips that can help.

Crosstalk can cause a lot of problems in the performance of a circuit board. Here are some guidelines on how to reduce crosstalk in your PCB layout designs.

Easily meet length and phase pin-to-pin constraints as traces bend without creating electrical issues.

Even as everything related to electronics shrinks in size, a few small areas that we have been able to ignore so far remain. Along with the physical reduction, we also encounter reductions in our...

Design rules are nothing new. Our ability to create specific and concrete rules to govern the results should not be overlooked. From the first placement study to the final result, capturing a...

Knowledge workers are of the variety that knows and does something that their manager probably doesn't. Even the schematic capture experts struggle with the layout software. It has always been a...

Not just one, there should be a sanity check at every major step in the life of a layout. Some of us fondly remember the Apollo program on the grainy black-and-white TVs of the day. The whole...

In my quest to become a world famous PCB designer, (stop laughing!) I've taken to putting my own words on the screen and sharing them here. My job is to enable design wins, period. It's a cruel...

We see it in the news frequently; a battery explodes, car brakes malfunction, electronic systems are hacked, a material inexplicably fails. Field failures are costly and unforgiving, necessitating...

Of course, you know what WiFi is. You can get it wherever money changes hands. Being WiFi-enabled is a low-risk strategy when it comes to the number of hot-spots you're likely to pass through on a...

A sound constraint management design process helps to foster a correct-by-design approach, reduces time-to-market, and ultimately optimizes the design process—eliminating the undefined,...

Routing DDR and high-speed bus interfaces can be one of the most daunting tasks in your design. With the new bus designer, all you need to do is simply describe the bus you are trying route and...

I can honestly say that I was working on the USB-C protocol before USB-C was cool. Google was/is part of the specification development consortium. My first encounter was in early 2015 trying to...

We are lucky to have the technology that helps us manage timing constraints. X-nets, pin-pairs, and match-groups may seem a little daunting at first. Once mastered, these are fantastic tools for...

Our most recent webinar, Constraint-driven design with OrCAD Capture, provided attendees with an overview of Constraint Manager for OrCAD. It is a new option available directly within the OrCAD...