Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1511130
8 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2023 During a recent trade show, a group of us were wondering how much money and labor is wasted annually because of PCB designs that are over-constrained or otherwise needlessly complex. It had to be millions of dollars, or maybe even tens of millions. Like a lot of long-running challenges in PCB design, this issue didn't pop up overnight. It's not like anyone wants to make their designs more complicated than is necessary. As we'll see in this month's issue, this happens for a variety of reasons, such as increasing signal speeds, faster rise and fall times, and shrinking silicon technologies. If your documentation template is too con- strained, but the system has been in place for years, you may have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra fab costs and wasted labor resources, along with jobs put on hold unnecessarily. The Shaughnessy Report by Andy Shaughnessy, I-CONNECT007 Simply Speaking