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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc.

DELL 125.88

-1.6%

Dec 31 3:59 PM EST

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To: Meathead who wrote (21988)	11/18/1997 4:41:00 PM
From: Paul Merriwether	Read Replies (2) of 176387

<<Show me a 2 layer board from any PC manufaturer. Where is power and ground? Show me a low speed 4 layer board from Dell. No such animal. >> The last time I looked at pc boards for PC's was a few years ago(I am not in pc "engineering" business). I think they used fat traces and "islands" instead of power planes(I thought it was pretty cheesy but I guess it worked for their low speed stuff). That was at a time when I was designing a 12 layer board with 2 ground and 2 power planes(for a research project in grad school)and which had parts that expected signals at 400 MHz(a big deal at the time). Designing the board was only a means to an end and not even the point of the exercise. I was not impressed with PC manufacturers' technology then and I find it hard to believe that they have suddenly leapfrogged and are leading technology (as you claim). I admit that I am not up on the latest in board layout tools(I think viewlogic/PADS 2000 make some decent stuff. I am sure others do too). The problems that you talk about, don't suddenly crop up but are fixed over generations of the boards. I also find it hard to believe that PC manufacturers have a hard time routing their 7 chips and 12 connectors on a huge 6 layer board. If you think routingthat is hard consider the challenges faced by a VLSI designer who has to connect hundreds of thousands + transistors. And repeat it thousands of times as development progresses. And then do it for different vendors libraris. And then verify that the timing passes for all temperatures in the ragnge. THAT, my friend, is non-trivial.Just to give you a sense of scale, th echip I last worked on had more than 400 pins, mixed signals and 6 major modules. The timing was a lot tighter than you as a board level designer can EVER imagine(and the timing analysis tools a lot more complex than you can ever need for pcb's). Its funny how you are trying to make it sound like rocket science(dell's great contribution to science and tech indeed!). So IBM hired all the dell burnouts? :)

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