Altium
9 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2021–2025
2:19:51 · 1M views · Nov 11, 2019
Rick Hartley gives a roughly two-hour live training on proper grounding in PCB design. He explains how energy actually flows in the space between conductors, and how that governs noise, EMI, return paths and signal reflections.
Hailed as the best video on electrical engineering and an essential, eye-opening watch for anyone designing high-speed boards.
11 comments from Hacker News
Some kinds of "expert" are a commodity: you can hire an astronomy PhD or a registered nurse. Entrepreneurs traffic in a special expertise: valuable, unique and defensible IP. All Roy Kroc had to know was how to teach people to teach other people how to run a McDonald's restaurant. A business that achieves "product-market fit" has a very specific and path-dependent situation. Sometimes you find this "one weird trick" that lets you make money hand-over-fist for a while and you want most of all to keep that a secret. Other times the knowledge is so specific (how do you grow the most rice you possibly can in this valley?) that it's not of interest to outsiders. "Expert networks" are notoriously promiscuous so firms have a lot of fear that they'll bring in an expert who walks out with more valuable information (e.g. "one weird trick") than the they can bring into it. My favorite kind of expert is this kind of guy this video who grew continuously through a 40+ year career and went from being in the dark about noise in circuit boards to an inspiring vision of how electrical energy flows not in the wires but through the space between the wires that makes everything I thought mysterious about antennas seem obvious.
Admittedly I ended up building a board with a microcontroller rather than a microprocessor because I could interface with the modem over spi too. However, this YouTube channel was great to work through: [LINK] It has some high speed stuff with ddr memory, fpga’s gigabit Ethernet and usb3 too so I’m pretty sure you could use the same concepts to build a board with a microprocessor on it. Proper grounding, emi, impedance control and length matching are well explained. I think he has some more advanced courses via his website too. Additionally, this was an ah-ha moment video for me: this video
My recommendation would be to search YouTube for "Rick Hartley". The guy is extremely knowledgeable, yet humble, and presents things like grandpa reciting a war story. It's easy to listen to, and I'd take him being on any kind of program as an endorsement that it'll be high quality content. The most important talk for beginners getting into high-speed is probably this one: this video because without proper grounding, interference and EMI is going to destroy your HF signals (for example CPU to RAM bus).
For anyone who cares enough to watch a 2 hour video on it and hasn’t seen it yet, this Rick Hartley video is the recent gold standard of explaining the issues at play: this video
Not directly answering your question, but on preventing emission in the first place (and the best video I've ever seen on electrical engineering): this video