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To readers who have been working in the PCB industry for most of your career, you have probably seen a very diverse group of professionals with varied skill sets and backgrounds. My own background is odd, having come into the profession from optics and lasers, and then focusing on analog and RF electronics. Other designers might get started as engineers or as technicians, and some designers learn how to create beautiful PCB layouts in university...

The electronics industry is facing a talent gap. As senior designers retire, companies are scrambling to find skilled professionals who understand modern hardware development. This isn't just about drawing lines; it's about architecting the physical nervous system of AI, EV, and IoT devices. Whether you are looking for a 3D PCB design software free download to start learning, or you are an experienced hardware engineer looking to specialize, the...

The highest performing operational amplifiers often need a split supply with positive and negative voltages connected to the op amps supply rails. In this project, we’re going to be building a positive/negative dual rail power supply for a differential oscilloscope probe I’m designing. I’m making the power supply a separate project, as a dual rail supply is quite useful to have, and I’m sure I’ll find multiple uses for it in the future. In the...

High-speed interfaces are commonly constructed as serial buses routed as differential pairs, or as parallel buses that operate at high clock rates. These buses require the traces in the be bus have matched lengths so that the group of signals can arrive at a receiving component within a required clocking window. This length matching is constrained by the length of the clocking signal and the rise time of the signals traveling on the bus. For...

There are many ways to characterize high speed digital channels, with the goal being to verify specific signal integrity metrics that illustrate channel compliance. Things like S-parameters and impedance are useful, but there is one important measurement to be evaluated with a digital bitstream: an eye diagram. The eye diagram is a useful measurement or simulation as part of channel compliance. The measurement shows many different factors that...

In this second and final part of the Altium Designer quick-start tutorial, we’ll continue our simple hardware design project and move on to PCB layout and routing. In case you missed it, I’d highly encourage you to check out part one of this quick-start tutorial, which covered project creation, and schematic capture. Additionally, make sure to watch the full tutorial video below. Be sure to follow along step-by-step to get the most out of...

When starting out with PCB design, it’s common to treat the process as simply ‘connecting the dots’: as long as connections are made, it’s not particularly important how these connections are made.  Unfortunately, this couldn’t be further from the truth. As PCB design engineers, and especially with ever-increasing speeds of electronic devices and more stringent emissions standards, we need to be concerned with the most intricate details of the...

Learning how to use a new ECAD tool may seem daunting at first, especially with modern packages such as Altium Designer containing such a vast and rich feature set. However, once over the initial learning hurdle, the possibilities that tools such as Altium Designer can provide for you and your hardware designs are nearly endless. This quick-start tutorial, together with the accompanying video, will get you up and running in under 25 minutes –...

Non-functional pads are sometimes framed as an all-or-nothing debate, and the debates about reliability and effects on signal integrity abound. Should you keep them on your vias, or should you remove them from all vias? Like any design decision there are tradeoffs to balance, and typically one aspect of a design will take precedence over all others. Because there is no generalized rule about the use of non-functional pads, designers should...