PDN Design SeriesJoin PCB Design Skool
Six resources that connect PDN physics, practical calculation, and layout rules — without simulation software and without copying someone else's reference design. Every capacitor on your next board will have a reason.
Part of PCB Design Skool. Included with the Standard membership — $29/month →
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Each one standalone useful. Together they cover every stage from understanding to applying — all inside PCB Design Skool.
Long-form technical resource covering how power delivery networks work at frequency. Capacitor behaviour, via inductance, anti-resonance, and the direct connection between PDN impedance and conducted emissions. Read this once and the rest of the series lands differently.
Ten chapters, each covering one core PDN topic, each ending with a quiz. Go in order to build the full mental model, or jump to the chapter where your gap is.
A printable one-page reference for layout. Cap placement, via sizing, stackup guidelines, target impedance quick-check, common failure modes. Print it once and it's there every time you open a layout.
Five questions about your actual board. The Wizard returns a personalised stackup recommendation, via strategy, capacitor mounting approach, and on-package decoupling guidance — for your design, not a textbook example.
Model your regulator, plane pair, and capacitor bank. Get the full complex impedance curve plotted against your target — anti-resonance peaks included. For the first time, you have an actual number to design to.
The key PDN terms and design rules as flip cards. Track what you know and what needs review — a fast refresher before a design review or a layout session.
All 6 resources are included with the PCB Design Skool Standard membership. When the series gets new tools or chapters, you get them automatically. Your membership also includes the other minicourses, the EMI Control masterclasses, and the community.
Go in order to build the full mental model, or jump to the chapter where your gap is. Progress is saved between sessions.
The PDN as an energy storage and transfer problem — not just impedance.
Calculate it for your rail, and use it to drive every decision after.
The hidden inductance that decides whether your cap does anything at all.
Pad geometry, via placement, and loop area — where most layouts lose.
Match your capacitor strategy to the transients your ICs actually produce.
How the planes themselves behave as part of the network.
The stackup decisions that set your PDN performance before routing starts.
Placement and orientation rules where space is tightest.
What the IC already gives you, and what your board must add.
The complete strategy condensed into rules for your next layout.
Hi, I'm Dario. My journey with PDN design began when I joined BTO as a project engineering manager, designing battery management systems for drones and automotive applications. High-speed digital circuits, high-current loads, fast transients — and an analog section that could not see any of it.
Trying to make those three worlds coexist on the same board taught me that the PDN is not just an impedance problem. It is an energy transfer and propagation problem: where is energy stored in this network, how fast can it be released, and what path does it take? I studied the best engineers in the field, applied their work to my own projects, and compared what the theory predicted against what the board actually did. That framing changed every design decision I made afterwards.
Later, at ETH Zurich designing precision electronics for medical and research systems, I realised how many engineers were carrying the same gap. The physics was in textbooks written for specialists. The practical rules were scattered across app notes written for specific ICs. There was no single resource that connected all of it for a working engineer with a real board to finish. That is why I built the PDN Design Series — the resource I wish I had when I was still running board respins because my decoupling strategy was built on a reference design nobody could explain.
From Dario's work with engineers applying the same first-principles approach taught in this series.
“I would like to express my special thanks to Dario Fresu for his valuable guidance and support in making the system compliant with EMI/EMC standards. This achievement marks an important milestone in my professional journey of understanding, analyzing, and solving complex EMI/EMC challenges in high-power inverter systems.”
Every board you design after this, the PDN will have a reason, not a guess.
Part of PCB Design Skool. Included with the Standard membership — $29/month →
Complete the set: Signal Integrity Series · PCB Stackup Series
Both, but for different reasons. If you're earlier in your career, this builds the foundation most engineers don't get until after their first expensive mistake. If you've been designing boards for years, it fills the gaps in a way app notes and YouTube never quite managed to.
Directly, yes. Most conducted emissions failures trace back to PDN decisions: cap placement, anti-resonance, via inductance, return current paths. The Explainer covers exactly how these decisions couple into your emissions profile, so you catch the problems before the board goes to fab — not while sitting in a test lab looking at a trace over the limit.
No. The Wizard, Impedance Tool, and Cheatsheet work on existing designs. Run your current PDN through the Impedance Tool to identify gaps before the next revision or before a pre-compliance run.
A YouTube video covers one concept in isolation. An app note tells you what the manufacturer tested under their conditions. Neither connects the whole picture: why your VRM response matters, how via placement changes your impedance profile at 100 MHz, how that ties into conducted emissions, and how to get the right numbers for your specific board. The Minicourse is a complete sequence. The tools are built for your numbers, not a reference design's.
AI summarises what's already been written. The advice you get — “place caps close to the IC power pins” — is the same advice that's been in app notes since the 1990s. It's not wrong, it's just incomplete. The Explainer shows why that advice is incomplete and what to do instead. After reading it, you'll be able to tell when an AI answer is giving you the right answer for the wrong reason.
Nothing. Everything runs in your browser — the tools, the minicourse, the printable cheatsheet. No app to download, no simulation platform required.
Join PCB Design Skool on the Standard membership and the full series unlocks inside the community — every resource in your browser, available immediately.