How Power Integrity Failures Lead to Costly Redesigns in PCB Companies

1. Inadequate Decoupling Capacitor Placement

Many designs fail because of poor capacitor placement. Designers often add decoupling capacitors as a formality, adding one near each IC and moving on.

But placement matters as much as quantity.

Such boards can sometimes exhibit random resets or clock instability during testing.

 The engineers spend days trying to trace the cause, only to find out that it’s a simple power delivery problem that could have been avoided by placing the capacitors closer to the pins.

2. Poor Ground and Power Plane Design

A solid ground and power plane are the backbones of any stable design.

When planes are split or poorly connected, return currents find longer paths resulting in high impedance and noise coupling.

This sets up ground bounce, wherein the reference ground level itself fluctuates during operation.

The result? Sensitive analog circuits show unexpected noise, digital signals misbehave, and EMC tests fail.

Such boards are rejected in the validation stage at many PCB companies, forcing the layout team to rebuild the stackup and re-route the design entirely.

3. Incorrect Stackup or Via Design

Power integrity isn’t just about components; it’s about how the layers and vias distribute the current.

 If the power and ground planes are separated by a thicker dielectric, the interplane capacitance decreases, increasing impedance and noise – because of thicker dielectric spacing that reduces interplane capacitance.

This increases impedance and makes the board more prone to noise.

Similarly, vias with long barrels or too few return vias can restrict current flow between layers.

This may not be visible in a schematic but becomes clear during load switching or high-speed testing.

Once these problems appear, there’s no quick fix — the board must be re-laid out.

4. Overlooked Transient Loads

Modern processors, FPGAs, and ASICs can change their current demand in microseconds.

When designers underestimate these transient loads, the power rails can overshoot or drop momentarily, causing unpredictable system behavior.

Many companies find this out during system integration when the board fails under real-world conditions.

 The only solution then is to redesign the power delivery section, which can often involve regulator replacement or adding more capacitors.

Each change adds new prototypes, new validation cycles, and more cost.

5. Skipping Power Integrity Simulation

Skipping power integrity analysis is one of the biggest reasons for redesign.

While most ECAD tools now have native PI simulation, many teams avoid it due to time constraints.

 They rely on experience or “known good” layouts — but every board is different.

It’s impossible to see resonant frequencies, impedance peaks or transient behavior under load without simulation.

By the time these are visible on the bench, the design is already fabricated, and redesign is inevitable.

The Real Cost of Power Integrity Failures

Every time a board fails due to power integrity, the financial impact of that goes far beyond reprinting PCBs.

Engineering Time: Teams spend days debugging what looks like a logic or component issue, only to discover later what the real cause is.

 Layout engineers, signal specialists, and test teams get pulled into rework cycles that could’ve been avoided.

Manufacturing Cost: Every redesign opens the door to new prototypes, new stencils, new components, and new test hours.

 Even minor changes such as the addition of capacitors can change the layout, necessitating new gerbers and validation.

 Business Impact: Deadlines slip, customers lose trust, and delivery schedules collapse.

To PCB companies operating on razor-thin margins, each re-spin can wipe out the profit of several projects.

Not infrequently, one single overlooked PI issue can cause delays of several weeks and add thousands of dollars in rework.

 And yet, the fix is often something as small as a better capacitor layout or a properly defined ground plane.