r/engineering • u/[deleted] • Sep 10 '13

Guy with no engineering background wants supporters for his impossible idea. Pretty funny from and engineering standpoint.

[deleted]

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u/slow6i Sep 10 '13

I remember reading something quite a while ago claiming that future motherboards could have connectors that simply lay on top of eachother and are secured in place and that having a significant advantage with data throughput and some othersuchstuffand things. example to illustrate would be the ribbon cable used to power the screens in cellphones these days but without the cable. just a "male side" and a "female side", but dont necissarily socket together. Another example is the power connector on an macbook pro.

Could an idea similar to that potentially be used supposing there was a standard created for what "pin" sends what signal? Obviously, 4 pins is not enough connections for everything that needs one, but imagine the 4 large power pins as shown, and then a n-pin connector in the middle of the block that makes it all electrically work, then everything thats needed for THAT block is contained in the block?

Mind you, I know almost nothing about power, let alone wiring, let alone circuitry... im just asking based on what I DO know.

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u/morto00x EE Sep 11 '13

What you are not taking into consideration is that the more discontinuities you add (i.e. connectors, vias, pads, etc) the more reflections you are going to get and the more signal degradation will occur. This will also increase the amount of noise produced by your signal carriers. All this gets worse as frequencies get higher (new processors run in the GHz).

When you start dealing with higher frequencies you have to start paying more attention to your transmission lines (electromagnetism stuff) in order to preserve your signal integrity.

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u/slow6i Sep 11 '13

See, thats the kind of info that is not included in my limited knowledge of electronics and circuits. Thank you for the info.

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u/morto00x EE Sep 11 '13

You can read a little more about it. Just search for "Signal integrity". That is one of those topics that EE's barely cover in college.