Kontron wins design award

Kontron’s R&D design centre has won the top award in the Computers, Blades and Servers, Memory Systems category during the 21st annual PCB Technology Leadership Awards organised by Mentor Graphics.

Started in 1988, the TLA program is the longest-running competition of its kind in the electronic design automation industry and recognises engineers and CAD designers worldwide who use Mentor’s technology to address today’s complex PCB system design challenges.

The Kontron submission described the challenges its CAD team faced in designing the KTC5520-EATX server board. Included were the significant signal and power integrity issues in limited PCB space, along with costs, reliability and an assortment of government-compliance milestones that needed to be met.

Other considerations were the more than 17,000 connections on four layers, the odd-angled diff pair routing issues to mitigate fibre weave effects, the need for 6.4 Gbps transfers and a 32 picoseconds rise time and, lastly, a high density design without microvias.