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Shortages, tariffs, natural catastrophes, and a pandemic have impacted the way we design and manufacture products over the last several years. Knowing the parametric viability, compliance, sustainability, and the procurability of your approved components, is more critical than ever before. Learn how to ensure resilience of your BOMs using Octopart’s supply chain information within Altium Designer and how the newest Nexar API integrated within...

Before you can put a PCB in a mission-critical system, device, or vehicle, you need to prove its reliability and quality. On the manufacturing side, this is one reason we have copious industry testing, inspection, and quality standards that apply to PCB assemblies and individual components. On the design side, it’s important for designers to perform a risk assessment for mission-critical systems to ensure a design will operate with the expected...

The votes are in! The winning entries for The Innovation for Environmental Change 2021 International Student Design Competition (#PCBeTheChange) have been announced.  This is the first student design competition launched by Upverter Education, a division of Altium, in partnership with the IPC Education Foundation and Arduino, an open-source hardware and software company. These three tech leaders created a competitive space for young innovators...

Welcome to the very first podcast of the year! Altium has been very serious about designing WITH manufacturing, and so our guest for today is Amit Bahl, the director of sales and marketing at Sierra Circuits. We will talk about his passion for promoting sophistication on the PCB manufacturing floor. Watch or listen on the go; this will be fun! Listen to the Podcast: Download this episode (right click and save)   Show Highlights: Amit...

During the recent IPC APEX expo, there was a lot of discussion about SAP, or semi-additive PCB processes.  As with any new technology in PCB manufacturing, there were people that are excited to jump right in with SAP and start designing with much finer feature sizes and work through the inevitable changes to the traditional thought process. Others are in a let’s wait and see mode and of course, there are a few skeptics of SAP as well. There were...

In this article, we’re going to build a shield for an STMicroelectronics Nucleo development board, though as it is only using the Arduino compatible headers, it would be usable on any development board featuring Arduino-style headers. By prototyping on a development kit, we can prove our design without worrying about the implementation of the microcontroller, power, or communications. This also allows us to determine real-world processor...

In this multi-board project article, we’re continuing where we left off creating an Arduino-style shield for an STMicroelectronics Nucleo-64 evaluation board. In this project, everything is getting far more integrated, taking us closer to a finished product. We’re going to integrate the microcontroller onto our board and add batteries, charging power management, and wireless networking. In the process, we’ll talk about surface mount sub...

Transformers can provide very effective signal isolation and are used to manipulate AC voltage and current levels. They can achieve all this with a greater than 95% power efficiency, which is why we commonly see them used in bench power supplies, audio gear, computers, kitchen appliances, and wall-warts. Transformers used for 50/60 Hz power conversion have to be physically larger than those used in wall-warts, and hopefully, after reading this...

Just when you thought the chip shortage was rolling over, the supply chain rears its ugly head and US OEMs find themselves in another precarious position. As of 25 January 2022, the US Commerce Department released results from a survey stating that semiconductor inventories at OEMs are down to less than five days worth of inventory for key components, as reported in a release on the department's website and in other media outlets. Companies...