PCB — High-Speed & EMC (Advanced)
Curated: the advanced high-speed track. Learn controlled impedance, return paths, reference planes, crosstalk, termination and EMC from the field's most-watched free talk, prove it in Forge, and get certified.
How to Achieve Proper Grounding — Rick Hartley — Expert Live Training
Altium (Rick Hartley) · video · ~2h · Free · English
Why we picked it: The single most-watched, highest-rated free talk on grounding, signal integrity and EMC — Rick Hartley's ~2-hour Altium expert-training session (2M+ views). It rewires how you think about 'ground': there is no such thing as a ground plane, only a return-current plane, and controlling where that current flows is the master key to signal integrity and EMC. It's the piece every high-speed designer eventually watches.
- why 'ground' is really the signal return path
- return current follows the trace on the adjacent reference plane
- controlled impedance: microstrip vs stripline
- the fields are between the trace and its reference plane
- when a trace becomes a transmission line (rise time, not clock frequency)
- reflections and termination
- crosstalk and how plane discontinuities cause it
- stackup: signal layers adjacent to solid reference planes
- decoupling / PDN and loop area as the EMI source
Study guide
Open the study guide →1 study section · what to focus on + prove it in Forge, then take the check.
Forge practical
Build it in Forge Design · 4 checks · auto-verified from your design
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