Gage Applied ::. Data acquisition, test & measurement, digital oscilloscope

Mentor Graphics Grants PCB Technology Leadership Awards

Printed Circuit Board from GaGe Applied Technologies Winner for Industrial Control, Instrumentation, Security & Medical Category

Lockport , IL (April 30, 2007) - Continuing its tradition of promoting and recognizing printed circuit board (PCB) designer excellence, Mentor Graphics Corporation held its 19th PCB Technology Leadership Awards Contest. The contest showcases the achievements of engineers and PCB designers who use Mentor 's technology applications to design state-of-the-art complex PCB systems. This year's contest showcased a record number of submissions from countries around the world, including Germany , Switzerland , China , Norway , Singapore , Austria , Canada , Korea , India , Israel , Portugal and the United Kingdom . GaGe won the Industrial Control, Instrumentation, Security and Medical category for the printed circuit board they designed for a new family of high-speed digitizers.

GaGe's next generation of high-speed digitizers won for the complexity of its design, which is by far one of the most complex developed by GaGe to date. PCB design is a very critical component at such high speeds. Trace matching, controlling impedance, and differential pair matching requirements are some of the design challenges GaGe engineers and designers faced. The complexity of the routing, combined with signal integrity and grounding issues, were such that our simulation and design tools were utilized to their fullest extent. Extensive testing and simulations were performed to validate each design step.

The board is comprised of 12 layers with split and mixed signal planes. A split/mixed stack up design was used to optimize and meet the opposing needs of the analog and digital sections. A split plane and routing strategy was defined in order to reduce cross-talk between analog and digital signal domains. The design also has layer restrictions, class rules, trace length rules, differential pair rules and trace width per layer rules for controlled impedance. Plane cutout areas and copper/trace keep-out areas were also a necessity for different design requirements. Component height restrictions, component free areas, heat sinks, custom shields and high-density component packages are some of the physical challenges GaGe engineers and designers faced.

Mentor Graphics design tools allowed the GaGe team to efficiently design its latest complex, state-of-the-art, family of high-speed digitizers. "Without these tools, manual routing of the CLK signals, differential pairs, and high-speed signals would have been very difficult and time consuming," said Chantal Holloway, GaGe PCB Designer. "Given the complexity of this project, Mentor 's design tools allowed us to achieve desired results quickly without impacting the schedule", Holloway added.

Mentor Graphics Corporation is an internationally leading supplier of software and hardware solutions for the development of electronic circuits. Mentor 's portfolio includes products, consulting and support services relied on by the most successful manufacturers of electronics and semiconductor worldwide.

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For further information, contact Nicole Faubert at +1-514-633-7007, extension 3034.

About GaGe

GaGe (www.gage-applied.com), a brand of DynamicSignals LLC (DynamicSignals.com), is a worldwide industry leader in high-performance signal capture. GaGe, KineticSystems, Preston Scientific and Cyber Systems, all brands of the DynamicSignals growing family, serve a wide-range of industries by providing instruments and modules for PC-based test and measurement systems and synthetic instrumentation built on the PCI, CompactPCI, PXI, VXI, CAMAC and proprietary platforms.

GaGe's product offering includes a family of multi-MHz to GHz digitizers and scope cards, analog signal generator cards, digital input and digital output cards, as well as the programming-free GageScope ® oscilloscope software and a vast array of powerful Software Development Kits (SDKs).

GaGe's family of signal capture products consists of the CompuScope line of 8-bit, 12-bit, 14-bit and 16-bit digitizers and scope cards for the PCI and CompactPCI/PXI buses. With sampling rates up to 2 GS/s and very deep on-board acquisition memory of up to 4 Gigabytes, GaGe's product line offers the top performance on the market today in the 3 key dimensions of sampling speed, resolution, and memory.

The company's customer focus translates into products that are used across diverse industries such as Communications, Computers, Military/Aerospace, Fundamental Research, and Education. Applications served are Manufacturing Test, Radar (SIGINT), Ultrasonics, Lasers/LIDAR, Spectroscopy, Automated Test Equipment, etc.

For more information on GaGe or any of its products, contact the company at 900 N. State Street , Lockport , IL 60441.

Telephone 1-800-567-GAGE Fax 1-800-780-8411

For more information about Gage Applied Technologies click here.