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Materials Science and how this can level up your PCB manufacturability. In this episode, our guest Geoffrey Leeds the product manager at Insulectro talks about how material science can help solve the unique manufacturing challenges fabricators are dealing with HDI designs. Watch through the end and check the additional resources below. Listen to Podcast: Download this episode (right-click and save)  Watch the Video: Show Highlights: G...

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When a product needs to be designed and produced as a number of variations of that product, where each has different options or capabilities, the ability to implement Design Variants avoids the need to create a unique version of the design for each variation. This Tech Tip looks at a couple of examples of how it is used in Altium Designer.

High-speed designs will only operate successfully when they are built with the right PCB stackup. Your stackup must have the correct arrangement of power and ground planes, with enough layers allocated to signal, and all with material sets and copper selection that can be manufactured at the appropriate scale and cost. If a designer can get the stackup correct, then routing with ensured signal integrity is much easier, and many of the simpler EMI...

As much as we would like to build every high speed PCB perfectly, with ideal SI/PI/EMI characteristics, it isn’t always possible due to many practical constraints. Sometimes a stackup can be “good enough,” even for a high-speed PCB. This always comes from the need to balance engineering constraints, functional requirements, and the need to ensure signal and power integrity in a high-speed design, and finally to ensure compliance with EMC...

Complete Guide to DFM Analysis A good friend of mine has a joke about planning a new PCB design for manufacturing: he’ll often ask “have you called your fabricator today?” to stress that you should engage with your manufacturing partner multiple times in the design process. This is something that designers often forget, and it can lead to major headaches ahead of full-scale manufacturing. The fact is, your board should go through multiple rounds...

There is a particular example of transmission line impedance matching that is sometimes sub-optimally discussed. I’m referring to the particular case of impedance transformer lines on a PCB with complex loads. In the case of a complex load, the typical quarter-wavelength impedance matching approach does not work, and we need a new approach. In a previous article, I showed some of the important design points around quarter-wave impedance...

This is a very interesting episode, especially for hardware engineers. Duncan Haldane, the CEO, and co-founder of JITX joins us to share a very interesting approach to PCB design. JITX is a way for hardware engineers to write code to design circuit boards. I know you are excited to hear more! Watch this episode or listen on the go. Be sure to check out the show notes and additional resources below. Listen to Podcast: Download this episode ...

Working between the Electronic and Mechanical design domains brings unique challenges. ECAD and MCAD tools have different design objectives and have evolved down different paths, and so has the way they store and manage their design and project data. Today's designs of small and complex product enclosures that house multiple, irregular-shaped printed circuit boards (PCB), demand that this challenge be solved. To successfully design these products...