Comment by cactacea
1 day ago
PCB layout is as much art and black magic as it is science. I'm not sure why you dismiss the complexity so easily, this definitely is not just a matter of applying Maxwell's equations.
1 day ago
PCB layout is as much art and black magic as it is science. I'm not sure why you dismiss the complexity so easily, this definitely is not just a matter of applying Maxwell's equations.
Layout is a puzzle, especially with particularly high density layouts, but some of this is ameliorated by high layer count and fine trace/space boards becoming cheaper. Definitely not black magic. RF layout is black magic, let's not steal their thunder here.
It's just across-modal. The list of components are linear list, connections between components are graphs, placements are geometrically constrained, and overall shape is both geometric and external to the board. So you can't just mechanically derive the board from mere linear textual descriptions of it.
A lot of automagic "AGI achieved" LLM projects has this same problem, that it is assumed that brief literal prompt shall fully constrain the end result so long it is well thought out. And it's just not how it - the reality, or animal brains - works.
High speed PCBs are RF. At high enough frequencies, traces become waveguides, and the result cannot be predicted analytically. Simulation is your only light in this mess.
I have been lucky to not have to lay out anything that had frequencies of interest over 1Ghz or so. What's your experience been? E.g. types of signals, frequency range, issues you ran into?
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