5 Design Tips to help prevent RF interference in PCB designs.

The www.ema-eda.com blog recently featured an interesting PCB layout article:

With almost everything we own is sending and receiving wireless signals, RF interference is a growing concern. Even if you aren’t transmitting, you may have RF sensitive circuits you need to protect—almost every wire becomes an antenna or receiver and the signals they can receive or transmit can degrade overall performance. This is true for all products, no matter how small or minor they might be.  It is critical to have a good understanding of how design parameters can affect RF interference levels.

Shielding (a “moat”) is important to incorporate on critical sections of the board to prevent interference, or to prevent interference from other portions of the board, affecting sensitive circuits. The moat is that area in the PCB that keeps RF on one side and other signals on their side. Many RF vendors define signal quality by signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), the difference between the received signal and the background noise level. The “moat” must encompass all RF parts/circuitry and is the land pattern for the fence or metal can.

The ground connection needs to take the shortest path to ground so it has the least likelihood to catch anything on fire. This is the same with PCB Design. Ground location is the first line of defense when it comes combating RF interference.  Shielding on the layer RF ground plane should be placed directly below component layer. This paired with vias will allow the noises picked up to go straight to the RF ground plane. This will help to minimize noise, since we cannot truly eliminate it. 

Read on here:  http://bit.ly/2k4asK0