Board Design

Nuvation architects and develops digital and mixed-signal printed circuit boards (PCBs) from your requirement specifications to production-ready designs. We are generally known for high-end designs but also excel at simpler projects such as 8-bit MCU dev kits and interposer cards. Nuvation has an impressive track record for ‘first-time-right’ designs up to 34-layer, high-speed/high-density boards and backplanes. Services can include prototyping, pre-production design verification, regulatory certification, test fixture development, and transition to offshore manufacturing.

Areas of Expertise:
  • High-speed serial up to 10GHz circuits
  • High-speed parallel (PCI-X, DDR, connectors, DSP & FPGA arrays)
  • High-density/high-pincount designs (‘first-time-right’ methodologies)
  • Mixed-signal boards requiring noise/power isolation
  • RoHS/WEEE compliant Lead (Pb)-Free designs
  • EOL and cost-reduction redesigns
  • Quick-turn/short-fuse projects
  • DFM for high-yield, low-cost production
  • DFT (ICT coverage, JTAG test vector development)
  • DFx (volume production ready including BIST and test fixtures)

Project Examples

Optical Spectrum Analyzer
  • Extremely tight form factor constraints (80x105mm)
  • PCI Card Interface
  • FPGA, DSP, and MCU with fine-pitch BGAs, Actives on both sides
  • 18 layer PCB, extremely high-density

 
Set Top Box
  • ADSL 2+ Analog Front End
  • Digital Video board
  • RF Receiver, mixed signal design
  • Custom power supply
  • DFx Regulatory Certification
  • Offshore manufacturing
Infiniband to 10GbE XAUI
  • 22,000 net, 24 layer PCB
  • Circuit speeds up to 3.125GHz serial and 150 MHz DDR
  • Completed in 5 months, first-time-right with 0 cuts & jumps
  • Many similar successes in telecom/datacom, broadcast video, and defense applications
Virtex II Pro to TigerSharc
  • TigerSharc TS201 and Virtex II Pro DSP Co-Processing
  • Designed, developed, and integrated FPGA daughtercard with (beta) TS201 EZ-Kit
  • FPGA RTL & DSP code for interface and verification
  • Project start to completion in 3.5 weeks

Board Design Tools

  • Cadence ORCAD
  • Cadence Allegro PCB SI (SPECCTRAQuest)
  • Cadence Allegro Layout
  • Mentor DxDesigner
  • Mentor HyperLynx
  • Mentor PADS and Expedition Layout
  • Mentor Expedition Layout
  • Altium Designer
  • PSPICE A/D, HSPICE
  • ADS Field Solver, HFSS
  • Polar tools for PCB stackup
  • Eagleware GENESYS
  • Corelis Boundary Scan
  • Full hardware bring-up lab with DSO, DMM, Pattern Generators, Logic Analyzers, Rework stations
  • MS Office for Specs, BOM and Project Management