Spectrum Integrity: Enhancing RF and Ultra-High-Speed Digital Design with Altium Designer

Spectrum Integrity is a full-service engineering design service firm and solution provider for companies requiring outstanding hardware designs for advanced RF, high-speed, and semiconductor test applications. The company designs ultra-high-speed digital, RF, and microwave PCBs that process signals at frequencies from 20 to 110 GHz and above. The CAD screenshots show 12- and 14-layer ultra-high-speed digital applications successfully designed in Altium Designer. These examples have outer layer traces designed to support 50GHz signals and multiple inner layer traces designed to support 28GHz. These designs utilized complex geometries, split power planes, transmission lines, and coplanar vias successfully designed using a combination of Altium Designer and proprietary design techniques.

Spectrum Integrity, a company that designs ultra-high-speed digital, RF, and microwave PCBs, faced significant challenges in its design process. The company's unique design requirements necessitated a proprietary process, but it also had to interface with industry-standard component libraries and the design review processes of its clients. The company relied on a collection of specialized tools, but the native schematic capabilities in these tools were unusable. Instead, Spectrum Integrity had to use a third-party schematic tool that prevented synchronization of layout and schematic and lacked cross-probing capability. This made the process disjointed. Additionally, there was no free external viewer feature for the board designs, and no simple way to export design files. The frequent client reviews were a tedious and long process. The company had tried to streamline the process using PADS, but its schematic capture tool was similarly inadequate, and its version control was missing critical built-in functionality.

Spectrum Integrity adopted Altium Designer to address its design challenges. The advanced features and integration across the design process offered by Altium Designer provided immediate improvements. The company found it easy to customize the Altium Designer environment for the intricacies of RF design. Strategic, proprietary improvements were added to the tool suite to make them very powerful and efficient for RF and ultra-high-speed digital design. To streamline interaction with RF analysis, board designs were exported in Gerber data into a 3D field solver. After completing analysis, Altium Designer read the files back in AutoCAD or DXF format, a process that retained net intelligence within the integrated tool suite. Automation within Altium Designer PCB layout helped streamline steps within the design process. The version control features were very important to Spectrum Integrity, because RF designs often require multiple versions stretched across a very extensive review process. Altium Designer also includes a free design viewer and can import and export across many popular formats.

• With the adoption of Altium Designer, Spectrum Integrity has seen significant improvements in its design process. Except for two customers using legacy software, the company now produces all of its designs using Altium Designer. The ease of use and comprehensive training of Altium Designer made adoption quick and painless. The program was fairly intuitive and the engineers were able to be productive after just a few days of study. Customer design reviews have become much more efficient due to the design viewer and automated PDF feature. The ease of review allows customer reviews to be much more efficient and thorough, and it avoids unnecessary questions and steps. The customers of Spectrum Integrity are very pleased with the improvements.

• The pour feature in Altium saves Spectrum Integrity 75% of their time in the step of updating split power planes during the course of design.
• Engineers became proficient in using Altium Designer in about half the time it took for learning PADS.
• Creating PDF check plots with Altium Designer has saved considerable process time and prevented the need for a third party program.