Ideas for my first high speed design

[plaunier]

Hello,

I am looking to expand my PCB design knowledge and develop a high speed circuit (500Mhz+) capable of running an embedded OS. I would like to do this as my senior design project next Spring so I will have a year to complete the project if I start this summer.

I have an idea of what I'd like to do but I am not sure of the direction I should go in yet. I was really hoping someone on here might have some insight they would like to share. I am envisioning a design similar to a TI beagle board which is sort of a mini-motherboard designed around an OMAP ARM processor that runs embedded linux (runs at about 600MHz). The other road I was considering was an Intel Atom processor but this might be to advanced at this stage?

This is a very big project for me but I am fairly determined to make it happen. I have experience creating PCBs designed around microcontrollers that run at speeds of 25 MHz and less but none of these designs incorporated any high speed design practices which is what I am interested in learning.

I have purchased two books to get started with:
"High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic" and "High-Speed Digital System Design: A Handbook of interconnect Theory and Design Practices"


Please, feel free to share your experiences, comments, suggestions, or ideas; any and all of these would be greatly appreciated.


Thank You,

Paul



Over the past year I have been using Altium Designer to developworking on small PCB designs for he past year now

 

[horace1]

a nice range of processors are available from Texas based on ARMs and C6000s etc
Digital Signal Processing (DSP) | Texas Instruments

never tried to build one myself, always bought the development kits !

 

[andre_luis]

Layout designs at that speed magnitude shall consider strongly electro-magnetic transmission line effects.
Thus, the CAD with wich you´ll decide design that PCI, must have proper features( twist track routing / matched impedance routing / etc...).

Some companies use Mentor Graphics toolset.
( I used PADS, but it is obsolete close to others options developed by that corporation )

+++

 

[plaunier]

The design software I will use is Altium designer. It seems like a very capable program so I believe it has the features you mentioned but I have yet to figure out how to use them.

For the CPU I think a TI chip will be the best route. I looked into using an Intel chip but getting a hold of the chipset IC isn't very easy. Perhaps I could contact Intel and see if they would give out a free sample. Or at least sell a quantity less than 500.

 

[BabaYaga]

Hi Plaunier,
Since you have clearly specified that you want to expand your PCB design knowledge then i would suggest you to go for Beagleboard as it would save a lot of your time in designing your own board, you just have to do the layout of that board and (much better, you can create a different looking beagleboard), I would suggest you to select Beagleboard-xm which is built using DM3730 Davinci Media Processor, which supports excellent multimedia capabilities and the board covers a broad spectrum of interfaces. https://beagleboard.org/hardware/design/

If you want variety in your learning perspective then why not go for an FPGA based system you can design Xilinx Virtex based boards which covers some extensive High Speed interfaces https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/ml605_13-4_bf.htm
I would also recommend you can go for ZYNQ series FPGAs which are FPGA+ARM processor on a single chip https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/ml605_13-4_bf.htm

I Hope this helps.

 

[snail888]

For layout skill development,the best way is to practice more and more.
But before practice,it's better to go through some corresponding topics in forum,to study sucess experience.
And then,you should get to know some basic regulation of high speed layout.

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For layout skill development,the best way is to practice more and more.
But before practice,it's better to go through some corresponding topics in forum,to study sucess experience.
And then,you should get to know some basic regulation of high speed layout.