Printed Circuit Board Design Books

Industry veteran Thomas Stearns has provided the electronics industry with the latest book on the increasingly popular subject of flexible circuits. In a brief but comprehensive thirteen chapters, Mr. Stearns provides valuable lessons "from the trenches" garnered from his long and distinguished career in the flexible circuits industry. Full of practical experience from his long involvement with flex circuit technology, the author provides valuable insight into the inner workings of flex circuits from design through manufacturer, punctuating the text with practical examples and "rules of thumb", while providing a strong sense of the history and evolution of this novel electrical/electronics interconnection technology.

This is one of the graetest book on board design and its signal integrity. I purchased this book and could not put it down until I read it cover to cover. Superb explanation starting from general introduction, nature of resistance, capatitance and inductance effect on the board, Excellent explanation of differential signalling skin effect and optimizing on board decaps. What is outstanding in this book is that author gives fantastic references for further study. Chapter 10 is master piece describing modeling of decaps on the board and many many more. Combine the material of this book with "Brain Young" book of " Digital Signal Integrity" you got it all. Barvoo...for this magnificent work. As an ASIC designer and signal integroty specialist, this book has helped me a lot.

Full of practical design guides such as PCB Stackup, 3W rule, 20H rule, air discharge ESD protection, and ground plan & layout.

very good book for a SMT manager

There are two basic approaches to designing a system for low EMI emissions and EM compatability: One is to build the system and put it inside an enclosure with lots of shielding to contain the EMI. Another approach is to design the PCB so that it has low EMI and does not require very much shielding from the enclosure. Mark Montroses' book provides lots of detailed information on just how to design PCBs with low EMI. Unlike many books that give general coverage of EMI and EMC problems, this book focuses exclusively on PCB layout and design techniques for EMC.

Chapter 5 (Bypassing and Decoupling) is especially interesting. It used to be enough to simply place one 0.1uF capacitor next to each IC on a PCB. But with todays high speed circuits, this doesn't always work anymore. In fact, simply putting .1uF caps next to each chip can actually cause the system to fail if the resonant frequency of the bypass network happens to match the system clock frequency (or a harmonic of it).
Instead, you must consider the resonant frequency of the bypass capacitors and build a network of different valued capacitors for an effective bypass network. Marks book does a good job of explaining why this is true and what to do about it.

Chapter 4 (Image Planes) is also interesting. Understanding what image planes are and how they work is one of the keys to designing a PCB for low EMI.

This is a good reference book that should be in every high speed PCB designers library.

This book is well oganized and easy to use, but the information is often incorrect. We have found it to cause more problems than solve. Paul Clayton's book come much more highly recommended.

If you are a circuit designer building a commercial product, then it is necessary to minimise the RF emissions. But many texts on circuitry gloss over the details of how to do this. Perhaps considered too uninteresting.

Montrose offers a detailed contrast. But readily accessible to anyone with an electrical engineering degree. Hence you can read tips on how to reduce the loop area on a PCB. Indeed, he suggests that you can use surface mount components, since they usually possess smaller loop area.

There are also recent innovations. Like grounding a heatsink for a microprocessor. The latest CPUs often dissipate enormous amounts of heat. But hitherto, little attention was often paid to actually grounding the requisite heatsink.

The book also devotes an entire chapter to the crucial idea of an image plane. It points out possible problems with an implementation, and how to solve these.

Practical explanation of printed circuit board emissions, routing, trace termination ... covers all aspects of the printed circuit board. A must for the PCB engineer's reference shelf.

I'm a working EE with some design & PCB experience and wanted to learn more about the problems encountered when working with higher speed signals. I have seen what happens when you don't take the correct approach..boards that don't work, and many dollars wasted! Horrible!

I sought out this book after reading articles on Douglas Brook's company website(UltraCAD Design) and some of his information goes against what you're taught in college. But he backs up his info with experiments & experience instead of regurgitating "textbook learning."

A lot of so-called "experienced" engineers could learn something from his articles and this book.

This book was worth the money. The book seems to separate the "PCB designer" from the "design engineer" but is fine nonetheless. Probably 40% of the book is a recount of basic electronics theory for caps, resistors, formulas, and so on.

However, the rest of the book covers the hows and whys of induced and common ground currents (& noise), trace impedance calculation & simulations, and more.

Not a "perfect" book, but in my opinion it is worth the money and will supply you with plenty of info to take a good engineering approach to your next major design project!

I liked this book because D. Brooks displays real-world knowledge.

This book is truely for beginners who have no clue of signal Integrity. He starts this book with stuff like Ohm's law and how capacitors and inductors work which most people learn in high school.

But his explanations are really simple and easy to understand without lots of technical jargon. Very good for beginners bot not so good for more experienced engineers.

Brook's book is exceptional in the clarity of the writing, esp. in explaining key concepts that most engineers are fuzzy on. This book is great at giving engineers an intuitive feel for basic electromagnetics and how it relates to signal integrity and emi.

It's main strength (and to some it's major weakness) is that it avoids the mess of equations of better known books like Johnson's "High-Speed Digital Design". Brooks is also a good writer, and he writes very clearly. Don't get this book, if you already understand the subject, since it doesn't cover advanced material. However, this is essential reading for those who don't have a clue or for those (like me), who've memorized a lot of emi guidelines, without really understanding why they're necessary.

Given the book's title, the only area of improvement I can think of is a chapter or appendix on basic pcb manufacturing and terminology (buried vias, microvias, antipads, etc).

As an educator, lecturer and practicing designer I am given many books to read and make comment on. I find very few books that are able to bridge the chasm between the needs of a beginner learning about signal integrity and the needs of a professional desperate to solve design problems. This book is an excellent primer and reference for understanding the interrelationship between the board layout and the signal integrity problem. This book details design solutions to classic signal integrity problems and educates the novice in understanding the reasoning behind the solutions. There is a lot of nonsense being written about signal integrity and few people have the resources to filter out the chaff from hay. This book proves every principle presented with tested board layouts, demonstrated engineering principles, or documented laboratory results. Some people can see the world in formulas and some see the world pictorially. This book is rich in both forms of expressionism and its presentation will not exasperate the PCB designer who sees the world visually, or frustrate the engineer seeking equations for design representation. This book has been added to the required reading list for our PCB layout designers and product development engineering teams.

I had the opportunity to read the Green Electronics Design and Manufacturing book by Prof Sammy Shina and was impressed by the methods and techniques detailing the practical applications of the green design and manufacturing concepts for both existing & new electronics products as well as the mathematical analysis needed for green conversion in statistics and long term reliability. The book details the tried & true methods to attain immediate results. I find most of the examples and recommendations very easy to understand and follow.

Green manufacturing is not a fad but a necessity these days and there is no better place to start than your own company and your products. Prof Shina shows a very good grasp of the subject & conveys the urgency of its implementation.

It is a right book at the right time for the Electronics Manufacturing Industry and I highly recommend it

Very usefull for those who like get more khowledge on related subject.

Buyer beware I was mis-lead by the statement below:

COOMBS' PRINTED CIRCUITS HANDBOOK features:
* CD-ROM with the entire book in searchable format.

This is not the case for the sixth edition of this handbook according to McGraw Hill.

One of the reasons I bought this book was because of that statement which is true for the 5th edition but not the 6th.

By the way it is available for Kindle at $100 Plus $339 for a Kindle. Also once you have bought the book it is available on-line for $27 more.

Otherwise the content of the book looks like it will be very useful as stated by the other reviewers.

I agree with the majority of the reviews here. This is an invaluable reference book. Put it this way, this book will likely save you at least one re-spin on a complex board. That alone will pay for it's cost many times over.

Cheers,

Complete coverage by a number of writers with diverse backgrounds. The highest praise I can give is that I use it daily!

I bougth this book to have a reference on the desing of PCB. (How wide to design the traces, what distance should i use betweeen traces...) I found it prety useless.

Nevertheless, it is a goog book to undestand the process and manifacturing of PCB, if this is your business

The only reason I give this book a 4 star rating is because of the information that was removed from fourth to fifth edition. To serve as a complete reference you must buy both editions. The topics covered are significantly different.

Excellent books. Must have for any person involved in Printed circuit board industry.

Most of the signal integrity/high speed circuit books focus on explaining relationship between two conductors, for example, the EM field between a trace and a plane. However, as a practicing engineer, it is impossible and unnecessary to calculate or simulate each trace when designing PCB. This is when this book comes handy. It provides quick design guidelines and rule of thumb without having to worry too much about the underlying theory. Many other reviewers see it as a drawback, but I think this book is pretty practical when used with more theoretical book such as Signal Integrity Simplified.

However, I found some parts of this book are quite difficult to follow as the author might assume that the readers are experience engineers who know all the jargons and theories. For instance, I am confused with chassis ground and system ground. Sometimes the author say should connect chassis to ground, sometimes he said it mustn't. The term "dipole antenna" appears quite often in the book, but it is not clearly explained what it is.

In conclusion, the books give decent PCB layout guidelines to prevent EMC problem. However, it doesn't provide readers the knowledge to do precise analysis and simulation to tackle signal integrity/EMC problems that might arise. I would recommend to get "Signal Integrity Simplified" as a companion book.

I got this book because the boss said to find something to help resolve the FCC/CE and other world EMI/EMC compliance issues we have, and it was instantly used and had the answers we needed.

It covers power and grounds, signal integrity, and used with Howard Johnson's book (High Speed Digital Design), gives a strong insight to the PC board layout issues of high speed digital and analog electronics.

So far it has been useful in my designs. They seem to be better and I am sure the book has helped with certification. It has some very useful information. Unfortunatly, it does not have much supporting information or theoretical proofs. Perhaps this helps the non-math oriented user, but I can't imagine why a non-math oriented user would need such a book or what such a person would be doing designing for EMC. As an engineer, I don't take things on face value without understanding of why. The lack of general theory also makes it difficult to extend the information provided to areas not covered in the book. In short, I'd like to know a bit more about why.

This book looks perfect on paper. The subject matter is important, it talks about many practical concepts, the cover is cute, etc. But trying to read this book I was very disappointed. The author has just cut and pasted some well-known ideas but doesn't explain anything clearly. Despite knowing the subject I found it painful to follow. I wanted to throw the book away after reading a few sections, but I kept telling myself "it can't be that bad, the material is fine, let me give it another chance". But the book is that bad! It is no excuse that this is a "handbook". There are many books that are not textbooks that do a great job explaining things. I feel sorry for anybody who is trying to learn by reading this book. If you are a beginner read Howard Johnson's classic "Black Magic" book. If you are more advanced read Clayton Paul or books on Microwave design.

I donated my book to the city library, but I was very tempted to throw it away to save somebody else from struggling with it.