Technology

Browse our library of resources to learn more about new technology used in pcb design.

When Should You Use a Flex Circuit?

When Should You Use Flexible Printed Circuit Cables? The two predominant reasons for using flex or rigid flex, are to solve a packaging issue or reduce the space and weight of the electronics package. These two are often interrelated and space, weight and packaging, (SWaP) will continue to be a driving force in PCB design. Read Article

2020 Holiday Gift Ideas for Your Favorite Engineer

2020 Holiday Gift Ideas for An Engineer Check out our list of the best holiday gifts for engineers in 2020. Read Article

How Multifunctional Hardware Teams Can Collaborate

IoT PCB Design: It's More Than Just Hardware Development Altium 365 makes IoT PCB design and coding easy. Share your designs, control revisions, and fork projects directly in Altium Designer or through Altium Concord Pro. Read Article

PCB manufacturing trends interview

PCB Manufacturer Trends and Challenges with Summit Interconnect Learn more about PCB manufacturing trends from Clay Swain, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, and Gerry Partida, Senior Field Applications Engineer. Read Article

Power Integrity for EDA Tools

Heidi Barnes, Senior Application Engineer and Power Integrity Product Owner Heidi Barnes is an anomaly in the PCB design world—a long-time, senior-level woman, and hardware engineer, whose career has been steeped in a wide variety of experiences with numerous technologies. Within the industry, she is widely recognized for her knowledge and expertise. Heidi holds five patents, was awarded the NASA Silver Snoopy for her work on hydrogen fire and gas detection, she is the author of over 20 papers on signal integrity and Read Article

Chip for the most powerful quantum computer 2020

Honeywell Claims the Most Powerful Analog Quantum Computer of 2020 Quantum computing is about more than qubit count. See why Honeywell claims to have the most powerful quantum computer of 2020. Read Article

Creating a Ground Plane for Your PCB Design

How to Make a Ground Plane for Your PCB Design It used to be that printed circuit boards seemed to have the same basic layer configuration, or at least that’s the way I tend to remember it. This meant that they were usually six-layer multi-layer boards, with a ground plane and a VCC plane. The old CAD systems didn’t really have the ability to do much with Altium power planes except to designate layers as a bottom layer or the like. The most you would see in them would be some “X’s” where Read Article

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Active and Passive RFID Technologies

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Active and Passive RFID Technologies When I’m designing a new PCB or product one of the hardest parts for me is choosing exactly which components I should use. It seems like every technology out there now has a different configuration to achieve the best performance. Even when you’re dealing with a fairly straightforward technology like radio frequency identification (RFID) circuit board there are a lot of flavors to choose from. While every type of RFID design label uses an active Read Article

Retrofitting Lab Instruments with IoT Capabilities Using Generative AI

Retrofitting Lab Instruments with IoT Capabilities Using Generative AI In this article Ari Mahpour shows you how to leverage Generative AI to create a full web service that controls your lab instruments Read Article

Semiconductor Foundry Capacity

Semiconductor Foundry Capacity: Who, Where, and How Much Semiconductor foundry capacity is increasing, but the capacity level depends on where you look. Read Article

PCB Circuit Products: Should You Design for Repair?

PCB Circuit Products: Should You Design for Repairing? As an engineer, I always feel like it’s a personal failing when I have to call someone else in to fix my stuff. Whether it’s electronics or the occasional bit of haphazard woodwork, I can’t ask for help until I’ve tried to sort it out. Plumbing, however, is another story. Then I call for help immediately. The problem with the impulse to fix your own stuff is that a lot of companies don’t actually want you to. I can’t count the number of times Read Article

Why Are Advanced Car Radars Using So Many Antennas?

Why Are Advanced Car Radars Using So Many Antennas? Advanced car radar systems rely on large virtual arrays for high-resolution imaging, long range, and/or tracking of multiple objects. Read Article

The Current State of AI in PCB Design in 2023

The Current State of AI in PCB Design in 2023 Your favorite machine learning, optimization, and generative AI algorithms may soon be used in your favorite PCB design program. Now that ChatGPT has become a household name and competitor companies are developing their own GPT equivalents (Claude, LLaMa, etc.), EDA startups are looking at how to leverage these tools to help PCB designers and engineers be more productive. With so many industries touched by automation and AI, it was only a matter Read Article

How to Build a Hardware Startup: Beginning to Realize Your Electronics Dreams

How to Build a Hardware Startup: Beginning to Realize Your Electronics Dreams Every hardware startup has questions on funding, sourcing, testing, and manufacturing. Let’s go step-by-step through the main questions. Read Article

Electronic Hardware Startup Tips: From Idea to Manufacturing

Electronic Hardware Startup Tips: From Idea to Manufacturing AI, smart devices, proliferation of high compute to the edge, and ubiquitous integration of just about every electronic devices have put us solidly in what some call the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The history of the past two decades of technological development is one where the barriers to entry into market have never been lower, including for innovators who have never built a piece of hardware. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that we Read Article

Optical PHY PCB Layout for Gigabit and Faster Ethernet

Optical PHY PCB Layout for 100 Gigabit and Faster Ethernet Need to layout a board to connect to an optical PHY transceiver? Here are some high speed design aspects you’ll need to consider. Read Article

Substrate-Like PCBs

Substrate-Like PCBs Push the Limits of HDI A substrate-like PCB looks similar to an HDI PCB and similar to an IC substrate. Read this article to learn about substrate-like PCBs. Read Article