Training Courses

View the 3 hours session with Lee Ritchey

With the ever increasing speeds of logic and RF systems, the demands placed on PCBs have made it necessary to consider more than impedance when designing the stackup used to for PCB manufacturing.

Traditionally, the electronics industry has placed the burden for designing the PCB stackup on the front end engineering personnel at PCB fabricators. While this is convenient for design engineers it places responsibility for several key electrical performance decisions on the fabricator's engineers which they are not equipped to handle. Among those performance decisions are crosstalk rules, impedance targets, interplane capacitance needs and types of weaves that will minimize differential skew between members of a the very high speed differential pairs used in protocols such as PCI Express, XAUI, Double XAUI and other data links that operate at multiple gigabit per second rates.

This session is intended to cover all of the aspects of PCB stackup design from materials choices to arrangement of signal layers and power planes to take the most advantage of the fabrication process. It is taught by an engineer who has been designing PCB stackups for the workstation and super computer marketplace since these products began to be designed and is currently designing stackups for a wide range of products including terabit routers and other products employing signaling protocols to as high as 20 Gb/S. The author has worked with PCB fabricators from the inception of multilayer PCB manufacture and currently works with both fabricators and laminate suppliers to achieve the highest performance from the overall process at the least cost.

Speeding Edge now offers One-Day and Two-Day public and private courses. Below are brief descriptions and the companies that have participated in these courses.

One-Day Power Delivery System Design Class:

Speeding Edge is now offering a one-day power delivery system (PDS) design class as an on-site class. Today´s high-speed designs use a variety of power delivery components and successfully designing a PDS and the PCB into which is incorporated requires a thorough understanding of the overall power delivery system. In addition to reviewing the PDS components currently available; this course examines how to meet the conflicting goals of the PDS system and how to address power plane, impedance and overall system capacitance issues.
For more information, follow this link.

Two-Day High Speed PCB and System Design:

This comprehensive two-day course from High Speed Design´s "Ratchet Man" covers all key aspects of the high speed design process. If you can take only one course on this subject, this is the one for you.
For more information, follow this link.

Speeding Edge has provided training and consulting to many of the world´s leading electronic product development companies.

Among those companies that have sent engineering professionals to the public courses or have scheduled private, on-site courses are:

*Denotes on-site courses

Here is a sampling of some of the comments from students who attended these courses: "The principals taught and 'tools' learned in the High Speed Design course have proved very beneficial, enabling me to use a more thorough engineering approach to PCB layout." Larry Hewitt, PCB Design Engineer, JTS Corporation "Lee Ritchey's course was the turning point in my understanding capacitance and EMI. I highly recommend this course to engineers and CAD designers who want to pass EMI tests with ample margins." Jelena Larsen, CAD Specialist, 3COM Note: Additional references can be obtained by contacting Speeding Edge

Back to Top