Top 10 Tips for High-Speed PCB Design
High-speed HF PCBs are commonly used in advanced electronics such as smartphones, tablets, sensors, radars, or other wireless or wired communication devices. In High-Speed PCB, for high-speed PCB design, every designer wants to eliminate crosstalk, reflection, or any other signal distortion issues to avoid data loss in circuits.
For reliable high-speed PCB design, PCB fabricators and designers have to pay extra attention during their design phase to enhance the efficacy of their circuits. This article will share the top ten tips for high-speed PCB design for better communication devices. The top ten for high-speed PCB design are as follows
1. Use Advanced PCB Design Software
The first tip for a high-speed PCB design circuit is to use advanced PCB software such as Altium, KiCAD, PAD, etc. These high-speed PCB design tools can add specifications of high-speed PCB design to our PCB circuits and create reliable high-speed PCB design circuits without much issue.
2. Select the Best HF PCB Material
The second important tip while designing a high-speed PCB design layout is to select high-frequency reliable PCB laminates and copper foils to avoid the signal issue. You have to select PCB material with low DK and DF values. Such PCB materials reduce signal loss; thus, add them to your high-speed PCB design.
The best laminates for high-speed PCB design are Teflon, FR4, and PPO. For a lower budget, high-speed PCB design, use PTFE laminates with ceramic coating. When the budget is not an issue, you can add the Rogers laminates, such as RO4003C, RT5880, and RO4350B, at the outer layer and cheaper epoxy glass in the internal layers for creating the best high-speed PCB design.
3. Use Transmission Lines
For a reliable high-speed PCB design, we must design its interconnections as transmission lines; thus, we need to use various transmission lines in high-speed PCB design. Coplanar, stripline, and microstrips are the transmission lines used in high-speed PCB design.
These transmission lines control the impedance value in high-speed PCB design, resulting in better signal transmission and less power loss in our HF circuits.
4. Employ Continuous Ground Planes
Continuous ground planes are used below components in high-speed PCB design to improve conduction and signal transmission between layers. This design tip of high-speed PCB design also dissipates heat. To improve its connection, you can add suitable filled microvia holes on high-speed PCB design ground planes and internal layers. This via addition, intensifies the dissipation effect of high-speed PCB design.
5. Impedance Control
Impedance control can be attained by choosing the proper dielectric material and maintaining board trace thickness. Designers should adhere to precise rules for regulated impedance while creating a high-speed PCB design board. They should look at the safety data sheets of the HF circuits to figure out which signals need controlled impedance.
The datasheets for the PCB components contain explicit directions for controlled impedance values for every signal group in high-speed PCB design. Typically, high-speed PCB design data sheets include the trace spacing requirements and the appropriate layers requirement for certain signals to be routed.
6. Avoid Vias or Component Placement between Differential pairs.
The next design tip for High-speed PCB design is to avoid vias or components placement between differential pairs of signals to avoid signal distortion issues. For a better high-speed PCB design, the distance between differential pairs has to be five times its trace width.
If these high-speed PCB design differential pairs need capacitors, place them symmetrically in high-speed PCB design to avoid signal distortion in HF circuits.
7. Use of High-Speed Routing
Whenever it comes to High-speed PCB design traces, an HF PCB designer must know the designing rules for virtual routing in HF circuits, which include not cutting ground planes and keeping traces trails short. To avoid crosstalk and other interference issues in HF circuits route traces and avoid unnecessary gaps between traces and route traces properly using quality PCB design software. Enable routing channel space when navigating heavy data and memory buses.
When a transmission line needs to cross a variety of layers, it is advised that a minimum of two thru-via holes be inserted for every crossing to reduce the resulting difference in inductance.
Advanced PCB design software comes with auto-routing and manual routing designers can choose the one that matches their high-speed PCB design routing requirement.
8. Always Place Analog parts Close to Each Other
For a reliable high-speed PCB design, always place analog components of high-speed PCB design circuits close to each other to reduce trace length and improve the efficiency of the high-speed PCB design layout. Place components as decided in the schematics of high-speed PCB design to avoid signal distortion issues.
9. Practice Trace Length Matching
When the better or the same signal transmission is required in high-speed PCB design, PCB designers need to match the length of various traces in high-speed PCB design. Signal propagation delay is directly proportional to the length of tracing in HF circuits. Thus to avoid propagation delay in High-speed PCB design, practice trace length matching in HF circuits.
10. Do not Route above Split Planes
When designing a high-speed PCB design layout, avoid routing over split planes of high-speed PCB design as the return path will not be able to track trace. Thus for a reliable high-speed PCB design PCB designers route the tracing around the copper tracing of HF circuit layouts for better signals.
Final Words:
It is essential to design a high-frequency circuit before its fabrication properly; otherwise, we need to perform much rework to improve the efficiency of high-frequency circuits. So in order to avoid rework and save money, we need to follow high-speed PCB design tips while designing its layout.
In this article, we have shared the top ten design tips for high-speed PCB design. However, to get a dependable high-speed PCB design layout to fabricate high-speed circuits, contact an experienced PCB supplier such as Hemeixin.
Hemeixin has years of experience in PCB design and fabrication and provides high-quality PCB circuits for their clients at the best prices. Visit us to get the best high-speed PCB design for your HF circuit manufacturing.
