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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: Paul Merriwether who wrote (22012)	11/18/1997 8:37:00 PM
From: Meathead	Read Replies (1) of 176387

Paul - Todays motherboards are pushing the limits of physics. Routing and interconnects are extremely challanging. Try performing a pin escape on a 500pin BGA with 15mil ball edge spacing. Minimum stackup for any serious quality motherboard is 6 layers with tight impedance controls, many are 8 to 10 layers. Only the very cheap, marginally stable 66mhz motherboards with low component densities can be routed on 4 layers. Pads is a toy. Allegro with Specctra is more of an industry standard today for layout. There are only a handful of good signal integrity simulation tools and they require highly skilled individuals to run them, develop models, scripts, run permutations and identify the solution space for each technology. Electrical, timing and signal purity specifications must be translated into the physical geometric design rules for CAD. On top of that, these tools cost between 40k and 80k per license! Consider 100mhz busses using copper and FR4. Not easy. Look at the PC100 sdram spec from Intel that Dell helped develop. Allowable clock skews of less than 200 picoseconds across multiple PCB's. Flight times of less than 3 nanoseconds for memory data distributed across multiple DIMM loads equaling 60pf. Address lines with 250pf. Edge rates around 150ps. Potential for prototypes being dead in the water is very high unless you simulate everything. It didn't use to be this way. Theres the 100mhz GTL bus with it's open drain buffers and 1.5v swings. There's AGP with it's data strobe matching requirements in the picoseconds again. The list goes on. I've been developing PC motherboards for just over 10 years and they are far more challanging today than just 2 years ago. It's becoming more like VLSI chip design on a physical/macro level. In fact, the tools motherboard designers use are almost identical. Here's a primer on the subject by interconnectix if you are so inclined.. 192.94.39.7 Unfortunately, we evaluated their tool and it was a flop. They are improving however. I will beat anyone over the head relentlessly with this stuff until they realize designing a dense, state of the art motherboard is no etch-a-sketch connect the dots endeavour. It's getting harder everyday and those smaller companies who don't have the experience or resources like Dell and Compaq aren't going to survive. MEATHEAD

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