• Electrical / Fluid Design

Top 5 Blog Posts of 2021

What a year! Even though it was still burdened with some limitations due to the pandemic, we have achieved quite a few things that we can be proud of. We have reflected on the year, remembered the small things and the big things, but above all the good moments of the year. From these, we have compiled a list of highlights from the blog year 2021. The list includes attending a live event, a guide to target impedance, and a free tool for E3.series.

As always, we would like to thank all our writers and of course you, the visitors, who make this blog all the more special. We wish you and your families a happy and healthy new year!

1. What PDN Target Impedance Means for PCB Designers

By Ralf Bruening

High-speed circuits are used more or less everywhere in electronic applications today. As a result, the importance and the mechanisms of impedance (here in the meaning of PCB trace impedance – typically referred to as “characteristic impedance”) for signal integrity have been widely discussed and seem to be generally well understood by PCB designers.

Simply put, PCB trace impedance is a measure of the resistance that a circuit opposes to a current once a voltage is applied. So far so good, but the concept of impedance is also used in PCB design to describe the behaviour of power-distribution systems/power distribution networks (PDS/PDN). And this PDN impedance is becoming more and more of a headache for PCB designers as IC vendors are defining increasingly tight so-called ‘target impedance limits’ that a design must meet (just a few milliohms over a broad frequency range).

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2. Digital Continuity in Product Development

By Oliver Hechtl

Today’s smart and connected products require the interaction of different components and systems. They are therefore often described as “Systems of Systems” (SoS). Engineers develop their elements in different engineering disciplines and departments. These disciplines speak different engineering languages and require unique views of the same product.
As a result, many versions – tailored to the specific process needs of each role on the relevant product data – are created during a product’s lifecycle.

The problem with that is: they are blurring the traceability of the engineer’s tracks along the way. The storage of the many different versions in their respective department naturally leads to disconnected silos in terms of processes and data.
The good news is digital continuity as per definition is here to overcome this disconnection.

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3. Creating customised E3.series reports in 8 easy steps

By Juergen Blatz

The new E3.ReportGenerator is a free tool for creating customised reports from E3.series projects. It can be installed license-free and started directly from E3.series. The E3.ReportGenerator features the Creator for creating the reports and the Designer for editing and graphically customizing the reports based on several parameters. There are many different output formats available. In this blog, I will explain how to create and output customised E3.series reports in just a few simple steps.

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4. Finally Back to Live Events

By Ralf Bruening

After a pandemic break, this year’s FED Conference 2021 took place as a live event last week in Bamberg. The conference is a gathering for the German-speaking electronic and PCB-related industry for more than 25 years, circulating across various cities in Germany and stopping this year in the charming city of Bamberg.

We shared a booth with our eCADSTAR reseller CSK, as we have done in the previous years and I also had the pleasure to give a presentation in the design track to explain the capabilities of our PI simulation tool to analyze PDN (power distribution network) structures (in particular PDN vias) efficiently.

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5.  Making environmentally friendly coating technology affordable

By Klaus Wiedemann

The start-up company INORCOAT relies on Zuken’s E3.series for the development of environmentally friendly nanotechnology coating systems. INORCOAT’s first system was recently put into operation at the Portuguese National Bank for the coating of dies for euro coins. However, the possible applications go far beyond dies and printing plates. E3.series offers the possibility of reliably adapting the electrotechnical equipment of the plants to specific areas of application and configurations.

Environmentally friendly technologies are in high demand these days – reduction of CO2 emissions, avoidance of environmental toxins, and conservation of natural resources are just some of the keywords we are hearing in the media almost every day. Unfortunately, environmental sustainability comes at a price. In many cases, alternative technologies are available, but many of them continue to be too expensive to be able to fully replace – or to substitute – established processes that are becoming increasingly questionable from an environmental point of view.

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