Don't Stay in the Tower: BOM System Communication and Component Pricing Costs Once upon a time, way back in the dark ages of the 20th century, there were three kingdoms: design, manufacturing, and purchasing. The royal design engineer’s process would look like this: they’d design the product, take their carriage to the manufacturing department kingdom where the designer would submit the design quickly and leave, trying to minimize as much chatter and cross communication as possible. The manufacturing engineers who receive Read Article Don't Let Lithography Issues Cast a Shadow on Your PCB Manufacturing Projectors can often be the most annoying piece of technology to work with. You could have a movie night you want to host with an old school projector and some nice, buttery popcorn but be unable to find a spot where the image projected isn’t crooked; you could be trying to give a highly-influential presentation to your peers and bosses, only to encounter that the projector has squished all of your images and graphs; you could be trying to teach Read Article Boats With The Current: Microstrip and Stripline Transmission Lines Trade-offs In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick Carraway, is torn between infiltrating the notorious elite social circles by attending his neighbor Jay Gatsby’s infamous mansion parties in Long Island, New York and establishing himself on the east coast in a finance career. It can be easy to have an understanding of The Great Gatsby through its context - the roaring twenties, flappers, prohibition - it wouldn’t do justice to any of Read Article Cross-Probing Electronic Components in PCB BOM Software with a 1968 Bel Air I have a friend who once bought a 1968 Bel Air that was in immaculate condition inside and out. There was one problem though: the engine ran really rough. Since my friend was pretty good at working on cars, he bought it for a very low price thinking that he could simply tune it up. It didn’t work though, and my friend came to realize why this beautiful car had come with such a cheap price tag. Then he took a closer look under the hood and was Read Article Old School Wisdom: Best Schematic Software Simplifies Schematic to PCB Synchronizing You’ve heard it said: “there’s no school like the old school.” Is that always true though? When I was a kid my “old school” taught me to type on a typewriter, not a word processor. If I was using that old school typewriter today, it would take me significantly longer to write this article. I wouldn’t have access to spell checking or any of the other helpful utilities that I’ve become accustomed to. I wouldn’t be able to easily backspace and re Read Article No, I Don’t Want to Make a U-turn: Guidelines for PCB Trace Routing Watching your old town grow up can be a lot like watching your favorite television shows ending, or watching a sequel years after a good movie was released. The town I grew up in was laid out on a grid with streets so wide you didn’t even have to parallel park downtown. It was a town so small that traffic jams were caused by two people in different cars stopping to talk more often than accidents. When I go back to visit, the town has grown; the Read Article Using Net Ties to Meet PCB Design Requirements The Net Tie is a Component Type that allows PCB Engineers and Designers flexibility when Handling a Variety of Design Challenges. This Paper Explores the Advantages to using Net Ties in Altium Designer to Join Multiple Nets (shorts) Into One Single Net at Very specific Locations in the PCB. Using Net Ties to Meet PCB Design Requirements: Defining a Net Tie component can just be a matter of specifying it in the Type field of the Component Read Article Facilities Management: Smart Buildings Combine IoT and Analytics for Operational Excellence Read Article Electronic Parts Obsolescence Management, It's Your Move I started playing chess a bit more seriously a few years ago and have since become quite capable of planning out moves several turns in advance with an accurate prediction of how my opponent will react to them. I wouldn’t even consider competitive with my chess skills, but there are professionals who can predict moves and match outcomes between 60 and 100 moves in the future. While it’s a strong practice to get into, being able to predict moves Read Article Preventing Critical PCB Contamination: There Goes the Boom Ensuring chemical compatibility isn’t always as straightforward as avoiding throwing oil on a fire. When I was an undergrad, I worked in a lab with a heavy emphasis on etching. Processing steps use a range of chemicals, and sometimes these chemicals would not be compatible. One day, a student coworker of mine was hearing weird sounds while etching. After a few minutes, he pulled the fume hood shut and encountered a small explosion from Read Article PCB Design for Electromagnetic Compatibility PCB Design for electromagnetic compatibility with the goal of reduced EMI and passing EMC compliance testing. Read Article Drones, Robots and Thermal Management: OnTrack Newsletter December 2017 On Track Newsletter December 2017 VOL. 1 No 9 Welcome to the December issue of Altium Designer’s On Track Newsletter. In celebration of our far reaching global community, we are shining the spotlight on an impressive PCB designer from Norway this month. Tor-Anders Lunder designs boards for a startup company called Staaker which makes a tracking drone with a camera mount for sports enthusiasts. In Maker Space, we highlight a group of Brazilian Read Article Internet of Things Security Vulnerabilities: It's All About That Buffer Overflow I follow a bunch of animal and nature publications, and recently the phrase ‘zombie ants,’ kept popping up in my feed. I decided to do a little digging and discovered that there’s a type of fungi - Ophiocordyceps - whose life cycle involves infecting ants that walk across its spores with fungal cells that infiltrate the ant’s central nervous system and essentially take over the ant. Once they have the ant "under its control", the fungus-infected Read Article Interactive Routing Datasheet The PCB editor’s advanced routing engine includes push and shove, hug, walk around, and interactive length tuning modes for single-ended and differential pair routes. ™ enable complex signal-path groupings across the PCB to be tuned for any high-speed technology, with the Wizard to automate the setup of modern topologies including DDR2/3/4, USB 3.0, and more. ® provides user-guided routing automation to route and tune across defined layers Read Article Rigid-Flex and Multi-Board Designs Datasheet To learn more about this topic please see the full solution - Rigid-Flex and Mulit-Board - at Altium.com. Read Article MCAD Collaboration Datasheet To learn more about this topic please see the full solution - MCAD Collaboration - at Altium.com. Read Article Manufacturing Outputs Documentation and Datasheet Who wants to send their masterfully designed PCB to their fabricator, only to be told that the board is un-manufacturable? This can happen for a number of reasons, including outdated supplier data, incomplete documentation, improper panelization schemes, or a lack of fabrication documentation. Instead of relying on different programs to design your PCB and generate deliverables, you need an integrated software platform that includes all the Read Article Pagination First page « First Previous page ‹‹ Page162 Current page163 Page164 Page165 Page166 Page167 Next page ›› Last page Last » Load More
