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One of PCEA’s (Printed Circuit Engineering Association) goals is to provide accessible education, affordable to everyone in the electronics industry. In this episode, we are fortunate to have two passionate educators in the industry, Mike Buetow and Mike Creeden. We will talk about the PCEA’s efforts to use all possible platforms to promote educational programs for design engineers. PCEA, it's an international network of engineers, designers...

If you look at the way people have used FPGAs, they are a miracle product in many ways. -Mark Oliver Our guest Mark Oliver, VP of marketing at Efinix talks about the evolving role of FPGAs in the industry beyond prototyping. Mark will give us a very insightful use of FPGA as an efficient custom silicon solution and will go deep on the importance of RISC-V for processor designs. Watch through the end, and be sure to check the additional...

Real electronic products have been slowly getting smarter, both from the implementation of an embedded application and connections back to a cloud platform or application. Embedded development teams have to work together to create these new generations of products. One area where the PCB layout engineer, embedded developer, and even the MCAD engineer can get delayed in finishing a project is in I/O selection. This happens whenever you have...

To the outside observer, it might seem that flex and rigid-flex PCBs originated in devices with movable parts, such as mobile phones and laptops, with the idea of eliminating or consolidating cables. The truth is that they trace their origins back to military and aerospace systems in the 1960s. There were several motivations for developing these types of PCBs and assemblies, and the benefits found in aerospace systems can also be enjoyed in other...

No PCB material is perfect, and this statement particularly applies to materials used to build PCBs. The materials used in a PCB stackup are composite laminates containing a fiberglass weave and a resin filler. The resin contains a wealth of organic compounds and volatile materials that can undergo outgassing. There is always some small amount of outgassing, but under certain conditions, the rate of outgassing will increase. This is a phenomenon...

Miniaturization is an ever-present trend in today's electronics, with HDI PCB design and manufacturing techniques causing circuit boards to look a lot like integrated circuits. There is a specific type of PCB that blurs the line between an IC substrate and an HDI PCB, known as a substrate-like PCB. These PCB designs are intended to provide the same functions as an IC substrate and a PCB in a single assembly, making them an important integration...

Join us as we reflect on the best moments and the coolest guests we've had on the OnTrack podcast this year. 2022 has been a whirlwind year for the electronics industry–chip shortages, and a supply chain crunch. Altium has passed several milestones, as well as releasing an education program. And there have been some groundbreaking reports from industry groups highlighting the need for workforce training and development, and workforce shortages...

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has become a more popular term now that 5G is becoming more publicized, but this term and the technology have been around for awhile. MIMO can be traced all the way back to research papers from the 1970s, and significant development was required before the technology could be commercialized. Recently, the drastic increase in wireless services direct to consumers and in offices has been enabled by MIMO. If...

There is sometimes a design guideline seen in high-speed PCB design stating that vias should be avoided on signal traces, both for single-ended signals and differential pairs. This is not totally incorrect, but it does require a bit of context. When signal bandwidths are very broad, reaching well into the GHz range, the via transition must be carefully designed to provide low return loss at the input of the via. In addition, once considering the...