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Design007-Feb2022

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FEBRUARY 2022 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 35 By Brad Griffin Electronic designs are increasing in capacity, complexity, and perfor- mance. This is coupled with increasing pressure to get new products to market as quickly as possible while, at the same time, ensuring that these products are robust and will not fail in the field. The only practical way to address all these diverse requirements is to make design and verification tools and meth- odologies more powerful, intuitive, and easier to use. Almost any electronic development method- ology and/or workflow can be segmented into three main stages: a pre-design exploration phase, the design phase itself, and a post-design verification phase. Historically, the engineers responsible for the exploration, design, and verification stages have used different tools. In this case, the exploration and design teams often prefer to use more sim- plistic tools that are easier to use. However, these tools then do not correlate 100% with the results from the tools preferred by the verification team which requires more powerful and sophisticated tools to ensure design integrity. What's more, all the tools in use across these three stages have traditionally been standalone point tools that are not well-integrated into the overall environment, thereby adding unnecessary risk and error into the workflow. To complicate things further, communication from the verification team back to the design team is often ad-hoc, being composed of screen- shots, documents, emails, etc. As a result, a typi- cal development flow tends to involve multiple iterations between the verification team discov- ering problems and the design team fixing them, hopefully without introducing new issues into the mix. To read the entire column, click here. an unsupported ceramic-filled laminate such as RO3003G2 laminate. In this case, there is no glass fabric layer, so the glass-weave effect is not applicable. However, due to the more recent high resolution mmWave designs, which use many layers for mmWave circuitry, a lami- nate with supporting glass fabric is needed for improved circuit fabrication, and then laminates using spread-glass are used such as the CLTE- MW laminate. Additionally, this laminate not only has the spread-glass, but it is also heavily loaded with ceramic filler and the glass-weave effect is typically not a concern at 77 GHz. With the higher resolution mmWave radar circuits, the prepreg must also have very good RF performance properties. ere are prepregs which have no glass reinforcement, which means the glass-weave effect is not a concern. Some of these prepregs or bondplys may need special lamination conditions and it is recom- mended to speak with your material provider's technical support person about how to process these materials for circuit fabrication. For certain high resolution mmWave radar circuitry, circuit materials that are glass rein- forced are desired for the PCB fabricator to obtain good yields and good reliability of the PCB. ese prepregs are oen available with open-weave or spread-weave glass styles and it is best to use the spread-weave versions of this prepreg for mmWave circuitry. Addition- ally, some of these prepregs can have spread glass and be heavily loaded with ceramic filler, which is a best-case scenario for mitigating the glass-weave effect. Many of these prepregs are formulated to be friendly in the PCB fabrica- tion process, but it is still suggested to contact your technical support engineer at the material company to ensure the processing and final performance will be as needed. DESIGN007 John Coonrod is technical mar- keting manager at Rogers Cor- poration. To read past columns or contact Coonrod, click here. All Systems Go! Bridging the Gap Between Design and Analysis

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