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One of the most popular AI at-the-edge platforms out there, the Jetson Orin Nano development kit provides a lot in such a small package. It has one of the highest performance-to-cost ratios among development kits and, as a result, has been sold out for months. If you can get your hands on one of these (which took me months to do) you’re in for a real treat. In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to get started with the development kit...

Legacy bills of materials (BOMs) never truly disappear. For industries such as aerospace, medical devices, defense, and industrial automation—where products are built to last—supporting systems long after their initial release is essential. Legacy BOMs are revisited for servicing, compliance, or returning customer demand. Yet the original parts lists, often created years ago, rarely survive the test of time. Obsolescence, discontinued components...

FPGAs, DSPs, power amplifiers, MMICs… these components can have multiple voltage rails which require power sequencing in a specific order. The purpose of this sequencing is to prevent damage from latch-up, transients, ESD, and inrush current. Therefore, a sequencing process needs to be implemented in order to bring up power to the chip and instantiate the device’s embedded application. As FPGAs are large components with complex subsystems, power...

Integrated circuits (ICs) are integral to modern electronics, packing millions — or even billions — of components into a single chip. From consumer devices to aerospace systems, these microelectronic powerhouses handle everything from computation to signal processing with unmatched efficiency. But what exactly goes into a circuit, and how do the microscopic circuit elements in ICs work together to drive today's technology? This guide reviews the...

Training an AI model from scratch, even with existing datasets and help from friends, can be quite challenging. As we’ve seen in Understanding Neural Networks and Building Neural Networks on FPGAs, implementing the simplest embedded AI pipeline on hardware contains stumbling blocks every step of the way. In this article, we’re going to look at a relatively new platform that does all of the heavy lifting for us, leaving the AI training...

Simple systems often use switches to control power flow and power-up, assuming they use anything at all… Production-grade systems go further and include multiple circuits for transient protection, toggling and timing power regulators, and ensuring reverse polarity protection. One of the simplest yet most important portions of a power system with multiple rails is the power sequencer circuit, which toggles power to peripherals in a specific order...

PCB stack-up decisions might not be the most glamorous part of the design process, but they’re one of the most telling. If you want your board to perform reliably, pass inspection, and make it through manufacturing without costly surprises, the stack-up is where you begin. And if you're working on advanced technologies like flexible circuits or Ultra HDI, your stack-up provides strong information about performance, reliability, and buildability....

In previous articles, we have discussed the importance of requirements management in engineering projects and the necessity of designing products with manufacturability in mind. It is essential to recognize that the design of an electronic product involves not only electronic design tasks but also a series of activities spanning multiple disciplines, such as mechanical design, firmware and software development, programmable logic design...

Complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs) are digital devices with some level of silicon programmability by the system designer, sitting somewhere between an MCU and an FPGA. Traditionally, CPLDs are only used in digital applications, where logic is implemented on a dedicated chip without the need to run firmware for an embedded application. This means logical functions can be instantiated permanently in a chip on silicon, reducing the overall...