Award winning designs: an interview with Peter Dill,
2007 winner of the Mentor Graphics PCB Technology Leadership
Award.
by Nargi-Toth, Kathy
Category: PCB design in the area of Telecommunication Switches,
Network Servers, Base Stations and Computer Mainframes.
Company Name: IBM Zurich Research Laboratory
Designer: Peter Dill
Design Description: Controller board for a 64x64 port high
performance optical switch
Soft-spoken and intense, Peter Dill is a senior engineer in I/O
link technology for IBM Research GmbH in Switzerland. His design wowed
in the Telecommunication Switches, Network Servers, Base Stations and
Computer Mainframes category. He took a few minutes to talk to PCD&M
about the PCB design that won him a PCB Technology Leadership Award
earlier this year and where he sees the future challenges for designers.
The 36 layer board had 3,644 components, with a total pin count of
42,142. There were no embedded parts. The seven FPGAs had 1,704 pins.
There was one FPGA with 1,020 pins; both were 1-mm pitch. There were 40
connectors with 285 pins each. The number of through holes was 9,188.
The number of blind vias was 36,053. The number of nets was 12,954 with
29,246 connections. The number of differential pairs was 4,072 and the
total trace length was 2.6 km.
To see the PCB design and hear what Peter Dill had to say about the
design process or to learn more about the Mentor Graphics PCB Technology
Leadership Awards, go to pcdandm.com/cms/content/view/3728/95/ in
PCD&M's online September issue. We will be featuring this and
other award-winning designs through the end of 2007.
COPYRIGHT 2007 UP Media Group,
Inc. Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
Copyright 2007, Gale Group. All rights
reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.