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What your Differential Pairs Wish You Knew with Rick Hartley - AltiumLive Keynote

Altium · 107.7K views · 2019-10-24 · 1:03:22

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Overview

Rick Hartley's AltiumLive keynote on differential pairs in PC boards. He argues the rules from cables and twisted pairs do not carry over, and covers which pair geometry gives the best impedance control, the right spacing, routing practice and how much skew is acceptable.

On Hacker News

HN engineers cite Hartley as the intuitive, field-based alternative to cargo-cult PCB advice, especially on differential pair routing, reference planes and EMI.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 6 months · HN mentions 2021–2026

Topics

Electronics & circuit design
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differential pairspcb layoutsignal integrityimpedance controlemi

What people said

dgroshev · 2026-04 · Strong recommendation

I found Phil's lab content [1] [2] indispensable for just this. Phil is a great communicator and gives in-depth explanations, so I didn't just watch most of his youtube, but also bought his mixed signals course and was very happy with it. Phil also recommends this lecture in one of his videos [3], which is still one of my all time favourite lectures ever. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]

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aaronmdjones · 2025-07 · Strong recommendation

I have some further video recommendations: [LINK] ("How to achieve proper grounding") [LINK] ("Keys to control noise, interference, and EMI in PCBs") [VIDEO] ("What your differential pairs wish you knew") [LINK] ("Secrets of PCB optimization") These are all by Rick Hartley (from GP's comment) and they are all worth watching in this order.

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mordae · 2023-05 · Strong recommendation

The article is not that good, but whatever. I am new to electronics myself and quite fascinated how has the art progressed in the past hundred or so years. There are people remembering "we were doing it wrong". Incredible. Anyway, if you are interested in signals traveling inside those cute green multi-GHz boards you make your living off, go watch Rick Hartley. [LINK] (How to Achieve Proper Grounding) [VIDEO] (What your Differential Pairs Wish You Knew)

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Sources

Video by Altium, played through YouTube.

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