OnTrack: The PCB Design Podcast

Welcome back, today we speak with Dr. Eric Bogatin who is the Dean of Signal Integrity at Teledyne Lecroy. Eric has agreed, once again, to be a keynote speaker at AltiumLive, San Diego - October 9th to 11th and today he shares more with us about his keynote and the courses he teaches at Colorado University, Boulder, some books he’s writing, and the makers he serves. There’s no grass growing under this man’s feet.

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Show Highlights:

• LinksEric has spent most of his career in the signal integrity field on multiple sides of the fence, including R&D, product and tool development, which was his springboard into education, keeping him busy for 30 years.
• After selling his company to Teledyne le Croy, as they’re now known, he is still focusing on best design practices, and how to eliminate problems before they happen.
• Currently, Eric is more focused on best measurement practices, or how to use scopes and other instruments to analyze a product and find the weak links and root cause of issues.
• At AltiumLive this year, Eric’s talk, ‘Breaking Bad,’ encapsulates best design principles and the downside of open-source designs as well as in-depth, specific design features on boards.
• Approximately a million Arduino Uno R3 boards have been manufactured in the last ten years, but they have many ground bounce issues and terrible return path control - Eric uses them as an example of how NOT to design a two-layer board.
  Using open-source designs may lead to bad habits. At AltiumLive he will discuss how to use the Arduino design and show how to measure ground bounce and implement the right design guidelines - refer to Seven Design Guidelines link below.
• The message of the keynote is: don’t apply what you see in a popular open-source design, believing that it’s the right way of designing.
• Right after the keynote, Eric will be doing another talk on ‘Mastering the TDR in 45 Minutes’.
• The TDR is the most valuable instrument to characterize, as a first pass, electrical properties of circuit boards, but it has several little-known applications in the lab environment, which will all be discussed.
• Besides his work at Lecroy Eric is also involved in writing textbooks and another book on the design and characterization of transmission lines through Horizon House/Artech.

Links and Resources:

Article: Seven design guidelines, Signal Integrity Journal

Learn, connect, and get inspired at AltiumLive 2019: Annual PCB Design Summit.