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I-Connect007 is pleased to announce the release of the third episode of Engineering What’s Next, a six-part On the Line With… Qnity podcast series exploring the materials, technologies, and engineering challenges shaping the future of electronics.
In this episode, “Rethinking PCB Design for AI Data Centers,” host Marcy LaRont speaks with Dr. Jin Hyun Hwang, business development specialist at Qnity, about how the extraordinary performance and power demands of artificial intelligence are changing the way engineers approach PCB design, materials, packaging, and system architecture.
For AI data centers, a “smaller form factor” does not necessarily mean a physically smaller PCB. Instead, designers are being challenged to pack significantly more bandwidth, power, and functionality into increasingly complex systems. As SerDes speeds increase and AI processors require more power, PCB designers and fabricators must manage higher layer counts, more complex stackups, demanding power-delivery requirements, and increasingly tight manufacturing tolerances.
Against this backdrop, LaRont and Hwang explore the growing interdependence of signal integrity and power integrity, as well as emerging technologies and design strategies, including sequential lamination, embedded capacitance, vertical power delivery, UHDI, and co-packaged optics.
Hwang also discusses why addressing the next generation of AI hardware challenges will require engineers to look beyond individual components and technologies. Materials, PCB design, semiconductor packaging, thermal management, manufacturing processes, and system architecture must increasingly be considered interconnected parts of the same system.
As AI hardware continues to evolve, the conversation offers a look at where PCB and packaging technologies may be headed—and why some of the industry’s most important advances may come from rethinking the system as a whole.
Listen to “Rethinking PCB Design for AI Data Centers,” Episode 3 of Engineering What’s Next, now available at I-Connect007, on Spotify and Apple platforms.
