live webinar

stackup planning for high-speed design

April 2, 2025 at 07:00 PM Coordinated Universal Time

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via planning and stackup design

Your stackup is the foundation upon which your entire PCB design is built, but often little thought is placed upon its design. When a fabricator designs and produces a stackup, they focus its production on the materials, technologies and experiences they have available, sometimes without consideration of your overall signal integrity. As speeds go faster and margins get smaller, the small details of board fabrication – like plating layer thickness, or metal roughness on core vs. prepreg vs. plating surfaces – can significantly impact design performance. In order to ensure simulation results are accurate, it has become critical to model and analyze a board as it will be manufactured – instead of using traditional methods. This webinar will show you how to evaluate PCB tradeoffs and create a detailed board model that ensures that the detailed design simulations you perform reflect the behavior of the board as it will actually be built, instead of reflecting the behavior of a board as you wish it could be built.

What You Will Learn:

  • Via planning as part of the stackup design process
  • Signal skew as caused by material selection
  • External factors that cause loss within a stackup design
  • Build a robust stackup quickly
  • Select and compare dielectric materials from multiple vendors

Who Should Attend:

  • Electrical Engineers
  • Materials Engineer
  • PCB Designers
  • SI Engineers
  • NPI Engineers
  • Hardware Design Managers

Products Covered:

  • Z-planner Enterprise

Meet the speaker

Z-zero

Bill Hargin

CEO

Bill Hargin is the chief everything officer at Z-zero, developer of the PCB stackup design and material selection software, Z-planner Enterprise. Bill is an industry pioneer, with more than 25 years working in PCB signal integrity and manufacturing, while authoring dozens of articles on signal integrity, stackup design, and material selection. Hargin is also the author of the iConnect007 publication Stackups, the Design within the Design, a regular columnist for Printed Circuit Design and Fabrication magazine, and a contributing author for the Printed Circuits Handbook.

Bill is a regular speaker and panelist at both DesignCon and PCB West, and more than 10,000 engineers and PCB designers worldwide have taken his workshop on high-speed PCB design. Mr. Hargin served as director of marketing for Mentor Graphics’ HyperLynx SI software and as the Director of North American Marketing for Nan Ya Plastic’s PCB laminate division in Taiwan before founding Z-zero.

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