66 The PCB Design Magazine • February 2016
1
Cadence's Steve Chidester
Loses Battle with Cancer
our friend and colleague
Steve Chidester has suc-
cumbed to cancer. Steve was
in marketing for more than
30 years, as product market-
ing manager for Cadence
Design Systems and later as
VP of marketing for Zuken,
before returning to Cadence.
Steve was a great guy, always willing to talk with
the media. We'll miss him.
2
Designers Notebook: Flex
and Rigid-Flex Circuit Design
Flexible circuits represent an ad-
vanced approach to total elec-
tronics packaging, typically oc-
cupying a niche that replaces
ordinary printed circuit board
assemblies and the hard-wire
interface needed to join assem-
blies. Flex circuits have an ad-
vantage over hard-wire interface
because they fit only one way,
eliminating wire routing errors as well as the time
needed for testing and inspection.
3
Mentor Graphics Names 26
th
Annual PCB Technology
Leadership Awards Winners
Mentor Graphics Corpo-
ration has announced the
winners of its 26th annual
PCB Technology Leader-
ship Awards. Started in 1988, this program recog-
nizes engineers and designers who use innovative
methods and design tools to address today's com-
plex PCB systems design challenges.
4
Systematic Estimation of
Worst-Case PDN Noise:
Target Impedance and
Rogue Waves
In the dark ages of
power distribution de-
sign, the typical advice
was to use a bulk ca-
pacitor and one 0.1uF
bypass capacitor for
every power pin on
the digital circuit. This was very unscientific, but
served the industry reasonably well in low-density
and low-speed circuits. As the designs got more
demanding, the target impedance concept was
developed.
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