Extensive and meaningful innovation in EDA toolsets is a rarity in this industry. Toolset developers might offer tweaks of their products here and there that are of some value but it’s rare that a new toolset comes on the scene that can be a real game changer. Avishtech’s Gauss Stack is such a tool. It provides insight into those material characteristics and performance metrics that can make or break a design in terms of their predictability and reliability once the product is manufactured.

Avishtech’s Gauss PCB Stackup Designer and Simulator is a game-changer in characterizing and predicting glass weave induced skew. When evaluated against Samtec’s real world skew measurements and skew mitigation trace designs, Gauss Stack successfully matched our expectations and data. Designers can leverage this unique tool to test design aspects of various laminates and trace geometries to help achieve desired results. I would recommend that anyone interested in differential pair skew look into this innovation.

What Avishtech has built with Gauss Stack is not just an incremental change, but, rather, a fundamental shift in how I can design PCB stacks. It allows me to catch manufacturability issues like resin starvation and glass lock/glass stop, which can also cause CAF and other related issues, as well as predict the reliability of the solder joints and vias, on top of impedance and loss modeling, all at the design stage, rather than learning of these issues many months into the development process. Gauss Stack empowers me to virtually prototype several different stackups to compare them in terms of manufacturability, reliability, and signal integrity and help identify which stackup fits the right balance of requirements to take products to market faster, without having to build test vehicle after test vehicle.