OnTrack: The PCB Design Podcast

Jason Ellison is a Signal Integrity Engineer and graduated from Penn State University with a Master’s of Science in Electrical Engineering. He currently develops high-speed interconnects, and calibration and automation technology for Amphenol out of Dillsburg, Pennsylvania. Jason has also written a number of articles for Altium’s PCB Design Blog and is a DesignCon technical program committee member, as well as an active IEEE member.

Show Highlights

• Form, Fit and Function: Jason expands on the demands driving connector technology relative to high speed.
• With regard to signal integrity, connectors have their own issues—reflection, insertion loss etc. Jason reviews the challenges these constraints introduce at the board level, and tells us how to deal with them.
• Why you should let the PCB houses tell you what you need to do to make your board work, instead of vice versa.
• The importance of knowing what your PCB houses are capable of. 
• Recurring issues in Signal Integrity and how to mitigate them.
• Jason shares details of his secret weapon for generating consistently correct results for differential impedance calculations. 
• As chips become more dense, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to manage crosstalk—and lowering density is not an option! But there’s hope… Jason drops some advice on how to get the greatest amount of added signal at the lowest cost. 
• Designers After Hours: Jason surprises us by recalling the precise moment he decided to become an electrical engineer, and tells us a little bit about his hilarious hobby.
  
  

Resources:

Jason Tricks of the Trade Article
PCB Handbook
Jason Ellison’s Blogs
Jason Ellison on LinkedIn

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