High-Speed Printed Circuit Boards: A Tutorial

Circuit designers often tend to overlook Printed Circuit Board (PCB) designs. Circuits performance and the quality of measurements, however, are strongly correlated with careful and comprehensive PCB design techniques. Such design techniques are applicable to practically all circuits areas including analog, digital, RF, and power applications. This paper provides a fundamental understanding of common problems faced in designing high-performance and high-speed PCBs. While this tutorial paper does not cover basics of PCBs, it presents empirical and commonly practiced methods to deliver professional layouts. This includes studying on-board transmission lines and their matching techniques, various PCB structures that ensure good signal integrity, and bypass capacitors, for circuits up to 30 GHz. Conclusions and suggestions are justified with theoretical analysis and supported by simulations and measurements.