Halford to resolve signal integrity issues

Advanced Layout Solutions has recruited Chris Halford to help support customers who are finding that signal integrity is increasingly becoming a concern within their PCB designs.

As PCB designs become more complex, signal integrity is becoming more and more important for designers and manufacturers.

Aware of this, Advanced Layout Solutions has recruited Chris Halford to help support customers who are finding that signal integrity is increasingly becoming a concern within their PCB designs.

Nigel Barkus, Director of Advanced Layout Solutions, commented: "As a leading PCB design bureau, we have been at the forefront of the implementation of various new technologies".

"We had recognised some time ago that signal integrity was becoming a major issue for a number of our customers but how to address this was more of a problem".

"It could not be resolved simply by buying additional software".

"It required the combination of a high level of experience as well as class leading tools, so we were very pleased when Chris decided to join us".

"He brings his real-world engineering experiences into the heart of our business and along with his knowledge of the Cadence SpecctraQuest SI Expert toolset, allows ALS to be perfectly positioned to offer its customers solutions to their signal integrity problems".

The SpecctraQuest SI Expert solution from Cadence provides the signal integrity engineer with the ability to explore, simulate, predict and characterise high-speed signal integrity requirements for a PCB design, developing graphical topology-constraint sets that can be used as an electrical blueprint to drive the physical PCB design process and measure the final signal integrity performance of a PCB layout.

After more than 10 years high-speed hardware design experience, Halford joins ALS from 3Dlabs, a Creative Technology company specialising in high-end graphics.

He is obviously excited about his new role: "Having been an ALS customer for five years, I know first-hand the level of layout expertise that exists within this company".

"Both myself and ALS recognised that it has become a necessity to have engineering competence within today's layout bureaus".

Halford went on to add: "Over the years, as signalling rates have rocketed, PCB design has been transformed from a drawing office activity to a critical part of system-level electrical engineering; to design a high-speed digital layout without competence in both can lead to failure".

"The combination of layout designer and SI engineer is already working very well".

"The designers produce robust, physical interconnect that is easy to manufacture and test".

"We can now analyse the same interconnect in our signal integrity tools and assess the impact the layout topologies and parasitics are having on performance".

"It's my job to ensure the PCB interconnect has adequate bandwidth to faithfully reproduce our customer's signals with minimal distortion".

"The resulting design is usually a compromise between these two ideals, giving our customers a board that is both high in performance and cost effective to fabricate".

When Halford, originally from Kingston-on-Thames, isn't simulating PCBs he is usually busy entertaining his 3 year-old, Rebecca, and 4 month-old, James.

When he escapes, he can often be found jumping out of aircraft above Salisbury Plain.

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