High-speed circuit design is rapidly moving to include miniaturization and high density as new chip materials and sensors provide highly mobile and remote data acquisition devices. COB, chip on board circuitry offers ruggedized circuits that support military and space designs through to everyday machine learning and industrial robotics. Omnetics Micro-D connectors provide a big step in reducing size to match amperage and signal path routing throughout system designs while fitting onto the standard printed board layouts.

Careful circuit board layout and signal routing for higher speed digital signal management has become critical. Specific attention to connector pad sizes and patterns on the printed board must be seriously reviewed to support multiple digital signal lines running closely to each other.  Layout guidelines are well established to
avoid crosstalk, noise and induced EMI to their signal paths.

The higher-speed digital signals begin to develop noise and harmonic
disturbance effects that can reach to adjacent lines if they are too  close to each other. The Omnetics Micro-D standard pad and line spacing is working well for many of the new digital devices and help squeeze more electronics onto the boards than were possible with the larger D-Sub Connectors.

Much of the potential noise transmission, such as radiation, and magnetic or electric field coupling are avoided by using the spacing of MicroDs’ standard pads and lines. The pad distance also avoids the "Induced EMI” effect on newer higher speed digital signals but is not so tight it causes problems. In addition, board designers must plan for matching rise and fall times of digital signal pathways on their circuit board layouts. Digital signal pairs must also be quite similar in length to avoid skew and minimize reflection from one line to the other. Careful power source routing and distribution is necessary to avoid low noise coupling and may have to be filtered on the board itself.

The dielectric constant, (Dk), of p.c. board materials has become critical in supporting fast rise and fall times of newer digital signals. Dielectric materials within circuit boards can be polarized during operation and negatively affect speed as well as dissipation factors (DF) of the energy on the surface of the boards, themselves. Higher speed substrate materials that reduce the effect of weave and transition losses are also replacing FR-4 materials.

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