How PCB Library Organization Expands Design Capabilities A popular children’s cartoon featured a superhero called the “Masked Retriever” who had a real job as an ordinary librarian. In the pursuit of justice, the Masked Retriever left a bold checkmark as a calling card and pursued anyone with an overdue book. In one animated adventure, the Masked Retriever pursued the most powerful man in the region by horseback because he wouldn’t give up his book. Unlike the of the Masked Retriever, PCB libraries don Read Article IoT Medical Product and Application Design: Challenges and Considerations Ideally, any technology is going to drastically affect people and the ability of people to accomplish whatever tasks they need. Yet, when new technology is entering the medical domain, the stakes are always a bit higher: one has to be cognizant that any faults, errors, or malfunctions are going to immediately affect someone’s health. Granted, not every medical device is going to be life-or-death, but they should still be considered carefully Read Article Constraint Driven Design versus Rules Driven Design in a Unified Environment Wouldn’t it be great if more rules in life were checked automatically? I love to cook Italian food, but it gets tiring going back and forth between a cookbook and a pot of tomato sauce. The only automatic rules checking mechanism in the kitchen is your oven timer. Fortunately for PCB designers, high-quality software packages include constraint and rules checking features that can check your layout and schematic automatically. The ability to set Read Article How to Create a PCB Layout from a Schematic in Altium Designer You’ve done your usual excellent job of putting together the PCB schematic. The circuitry is defined and you are ready to go to PCB layout. But this time it’s a little different. Maybe your regular layout resources aren’t available, or perhaps you want to try to do your first layout yourself. Whatever the reason, you are ready to start working on the board side of PCB design, but you’re not sure how to create it from a PCB schematic in Altium Read Article High-Speed PCB Design Analysis: Simulations and Signal Integrity Checks High speed PCB design analysis is an admittedly broad area, comprising basic calculations of important design details, as well as simulations to verify a PCB layout. Some important evaluations are performed in the schematic, or at the very beginning of a design when a layout is being planned. These analysis techniques also have different levels of difficulty or advancement, and they will sometimes require an external program to fully evaluate the Read Article PCB Design Software: Creating a Bill of Material using Altium Designer You’ve done it, your printed circuit board is finished and ready for PCB assembly. The schematic is finalized, the layout is checked and approved and you are ready to get this thing built. To do that though, you need to create a bill of materials. Fortunately, we are long past the days where these documents were created by hand. Every CAD system out there will automatically create a bill of materials through some library or other process. But Read Article What's New In Altium Designer 18 Webinar Recap June 19 Altium Designer® Webinar: June 19th In case you missed our Altium 18 live webinar, no worries. You can catch up here with the video recording and presentation slides. If you’re not a fan of videos I’ll try my best to summarize in the webinar notes bellow. Most of the key takeaways will be the same as the may webinar but do take a look at the questions as they’ll be different. For future webinars if there’s something you’d like to see add it to Read Article PCB Routing Guidelines for DDR4 Memory Devices and Impedance Follow these DDR4 routing and PCB layout guidelines to ensure signal integrity and correct timing for high speed DDR buses. Read Article Role of the Embedded PCB Capacitor in Circuit Board Design Mention capacitance, conductors, and dielectric capacitors in PCB to a 7th-grade science class, and you may see glazed-over expressions and hear bored sighs. I mean, hey, sometimes I get this with adults and coworkers I’m talking to so I can’t say I’m unsympathetic to the kids, but I have to promise them that circuits and circuit boards are, truly, fascinating. Let's help them answer the question: why are capacitors used in circuit boards? To Read Article Commodore 128 Principal Engineer, Bil Herd on Best Practices for Learning a New CAD Tool Curious about the early days of Early Home Computer Design? Former Commodore 128 Principal Engineer, Bil Herd shares stories from his illustrious career and Best Practices for Learning a New CAD Tool. Read Article Five First Pass Perils in PCB Prototyping Runs The first pass prototyping run for a new design is where its functionality really gets put to the test. The functionality of your PCB depends on the quality of the design you create in your CAD tools, but sometimes the prototype just doesn't function as intended. There are many possible reasons for this, which could be related to your design choices, the capabilities of your manufacturer, or both. Founders without hardware experience might Read Article Annular Rings for PCB and Nonfunctional Pads: Should You Use ‘em or Lose ‘em? Annular rings placed as non-functional pads in a PCB can affect via strength and signal integrity. Learn when to remove or keep them in this article. Read Article Design Planning with Differential Pair Routing Software and Directive Symbols If the components on your PCB are like the organs in your body, then your trace routing between components are like blood vessels. What looks like a complex tangle of copper connections is actually a meticulously designed system that uses well-understood design rules. Your PCB design software can help you maximize your productivity while routing and prevent errors using directive designations. Great PCB design software doesn’t just let you set Read Article CAD Layout Software for Modern PCB Design and Modern PCB Designers Back in the day, PCB designers drew schematics by hand. Instead of guiding a mouse, technicians used red and blue pencils to carefully draw pads and traces on vellum parchment paper. Their tools included a triangle, a T-square, and templates. Forget a thorough design process involving CAD tools, full team collaboration, differentiated schematic diagrams and circuit board designs - one was lucky enough to have a steady hand. After completing a Read Article Auto-Interactive Routing to Overcome Obstacles and Other Polygons There’s no doubt about it, routing traces on a printed circuit board by hand can be a lot of fun. It’s an engaging challenge to make the routing as neat, tight, and correct as possible to give you the shortest routes with the best signal integrity. Once you are done you can take a lot of pride in knowing that your measured lines are perfect, you differential pairs are spot on, and everything looks great. The only problem is that level of manual Read Article Dispel Confusion with Global Editing: Poor DxDesigner Usability Causes Confusion The world has turned the corner from linear to organic. The need for global editing within versatile environments continues to grow. It used to be I could keep one file in my office drawer to collect bills for the month. When I got paid, it was a simple matter to list the bills, add them up, and write the checks. These days, bill paying goes much quicker on the computer. But I’ve had to adapt to different steps on each utility website and Read Article Analog Meets Digital: How Converters Can Make or Break Signal Performance We are born into a world of purely analog signals. The sound of a stream running through a mountain meadow, the brown color of dirt, that screaming baby next to you; all of these ‘signals’ are of an analog nature. Yet, we grow up and seem to spend most of our time attempting to turn these signals into a reproducible ‘digital’ copy so we can perceive them through a digital device. Analog and digital signal performance is necessary to keep in mind Read Article Pagination First page « First Previous page ‹‹ Page142 Current page143 Page144 Page145 Page146 Page147 Next page ›› Last page Last » Load More
