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The dean is in! In this episode, Eric Bogatin, the Dean of Signal Integrity Academy is here to talk about empowering PCB designers to become their own experts. Eric shares the inspiration behind his new book, PLUS you may have a say in what he will be writing next. Watch now or listen on the go, and make sure to drop a comment on our YouTube channel here, to vote on which topic Eric should tackle in his next book.   Listen to the Podcast: D...

If you’re designing a circuit board to be powered by anything except a bench-top regulated power supply, you’ll need to select a power regulator to place on your board. Just like any other component, your regulator has stated operating specs you’ll see in a product summary, and it has more detailed specs you’ll find in a datasheet. The fine details in your datasheets are easy to overlook, but they are the major factors that determine how your...

July 2021 VOL. 5 No. 1   Full Article | Watch Video | Brain Food Thoughtful Systems-Based Electronics Design Recently we met Dr. Ed Becze, the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Pegmatis. Ed has spent his long and illustrious career working on highly complex...

Power supply designers understand the complex technical details and functional requirements involved with a switched mode power supply PCB layout. The layout determines susceptibility to electromagnetic interference (EMI), thermal behavior, power integrity, and safety. A good layout ensures high efficiency power conversion and delivery to a load while allowing heat transport away from hot components in the layout, and it ensures low noise...

I often get questions from designers asking about things like signal integrity and power integrity, and this most recent question forced me to think (again!) about some basic routing practices near planes and copper pour. Here’s the (paraphrased) question I recently received on LinkedIn: I am wondering about your perspective on mingling signal/power on the same layer in a PCB stack-up. Is it okay to route signal traces on the same layer as power...

In this session, we will be presenting the key capabilities of Altium Designer, our flagship product. We will also be conducting a live demo of the platform, and answering all of your questions live. We know that making the switch to a new tool is not an easy task, but in this session, we will walk you through exactly what your first 6 months with Altium will look like.

Circuit diagrams and schematics form the core of your PCB design, and reliability requires that you calculate the power dissipation in your circuits. Some components, like MOSFETs, have clearly defined electrical ratings, but determining whether your design will comply with these ratings is not such a simple problem. Calculating power dissipation in active components, some semiconductors, and MOSFETs takes SPICE packages that implement real...

“Software guys, stop blaming the hardware guys for messing up the boards”  - Ari Mahpour What is Hardware-in-the-loop testing and how it can save you time and resources when designing your board? In this episode, our guest Ari Mahpour, an engineer with broad experience in designing, manufacturing, testing, and integrating electrical, mechanical, and software systems. He will talk about how you can perform automated hardware testing in the...

Input impedance is one of those terms that gets thrown around a bit without a lot of context. Designers who know the finer points of transmission line theory should understand how to use this to determine what qualifies as an “electrically long” interconnect, rather than just going with a 10% wavelength value as a rule of thumb. Input impedance follows a similar idea in circuits, although we don’t normally treat a circuit as having transmission...