High-speed Data Center PCB Design Challenges and Findings by Intel ® Automatic In-board Characterization

There are more and more PCB design challenges in data center platform design by thousands of signals and higher speed data rate. Designers need to adopt advanced PCB technologies, such as lower loss PCB material, smaller drill size, back drill, higher layer count and so on to accommodate these. How to validate these PCB design and manufacture is very important to ensure the design quality. AIBC is developed for efficient and accurate PCB electrical characterization and efficiently captured design and manufacture qualities, such as PCB drilling, etching quality and manufacture variation. Through full scope in-board impedance and loss measurement, AIBC is very helpful to capture the design defects for design improvement of the next PCB re-spin for customer time-to-market and the early visibility by AIBC finding is critical to improve PCB vendor quality reducing down-range risk and product quality enhancement.