Lee Ritchey, President, Speeding Edge

This three hour session is intended to acquaint the design engineer with all of the aspects of PCB materials and fabrication that affect both the performance and price of a high speed PCB. The session will conclude with a straight forward method for developing a PCB stackup that strikes a balance between cost, ease of manufacture and performance. Detailed information will be presented on all of the materials available from which to construct a PCB along w ith the merits and deficiencies of each. Various methods of calculating impedance will be presented along with their accuracies as well as method for reliably making impedance measurements. This session draws from experience gained designing more than 2000 PCB stackups for products ranging from disc drives to multiterabit routers.