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There are many PCB design software packages available for download or purchase. Newer designers and startups who are just starting out will likely build up their skills from a free software program just to get to a proof of concept and initial design of a prototype. Once a design has been proven and it is time to design for a real product, a new designer or startup startup company will need to make the switch over to a paid software package. To...

As I am thinking about today’s blog, the phrase “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” continues to run through my mind.  Specifically, in this context, there are many ways that the SAP processes that PCB fabricators are now offering can benefit PCB designers.  There is a body of work being done to understand how to utilize this new PCB manufacturing capability and each contributor has a slightly different version of what would be best.  That is...

When designing a printed circuit board, you have to deal with a large amount of visual data of different kinds: layers, components, and much more. For efficient work, you should have abilities to display and use only the items that you need right now to solve a current task. The document below explains how to manage the view of your PCB using the View Configuration Altium panel. Master the tools for manipulating what and how is currently...

Everyone from engineering students to PCB design professionals want the same things: an easy-to-use yet powerful set of electronics design tools that help speed up the pace of innovation. PCB designers create important pieces of hardware that requires specialized software to design, lay out, and prepare for production. When you need the best design tools the market can offer, what features should you look for and how can you ensure you accelerate...

In this project, we’re going to design a LED driver for an adjustable white balance LED panel that we will be designing in my next article. The LED panel will be using high color rendering index LEDs with cool, neutral and warm white balances, therefore this driver board will incorporate 3 LED drivers. There’s also a low-cost microcontroller and a couple of slide potentiometers to control the brightness and white balance. This project is open...

Stubs are an important topic in high-speed PCB design, and there is a longstanding guideline that stubs should always be removed from all vias on high-speed digital interconnects. While stubs are bad for high-speed lines, they do not always need to be removed. What is more important is to predict the loss profile and frequencies, and to floorplan appropriately to try and prevent such losses. In this article, I’ll look at some simulation results...

In this project we’ll be building a moderate sized LED panel on insulated metal substrate (IMS), as a follow-on from my Studio LED Driver project. In the previous project, we designed a set of LED drivers to power this light panel.  This light panel has three different white balance High CRI LED types on it, warm, neutral and cool. By changing the brightness of the different white balances, the light from the panel can be adjusted to match other...

https://www.altium.com/ontrackIn this OnTrack episode, Zach and Phil of Phil’s Lab Youtube channel exchange ideas on how they can stay on top of their PCB design game or learn new things. Phil Salmony, a successful youtube creator with 64.6K subscribers, shares with us how he was introduced to PCB design, his early career, and what got him to start his own Youtube channel. This is a fun episode. Watch it through the end and check out the...

Pro circuit designers don’t just work with components in parallel and series when they design circuits. One way to build circuits is with circuit networks, which will have input and output ports. What happens inside each network can be analyzed in the traditional way (SPICE, by hand, etc.), but what is important is that the network maps an input voltage/current pair to an output voltage and current pair. Mathematically, this is quantified with a...