How to Guarantee Signal Integrity in Your PCB Design for Serial Communication Protocols During my school days, I was addicted to the popular FIFA PC games series. I could spend hours scoring against the best virtual soccer teams. I was so engrossed in playing the game that I become oblivious to my mom’s voice when she called me to run an errand. It goes without saying that I received a healthy dose of scolding from my mom and was slapped with a 3 months ban on PC gaming. This is a good example of external sources can cause us to Read Article How to Plan Ahead to Meet PCB Disposal Requirements When I was a kid and learned to solder, I had a mentor that kept an old coffee can on his soldering bench labeled “Lead Waste - DO NOT THROW IN TRASH.” Wire snippings, solder bits, and the random metal detritus that accumulates on a soldering mat all went in there. Apparently, it got full every few years and he took it to a local electronics recycling place to make sure he wasn’t adding any lead or heavy metals to the environment. I was shocked Read Article Designing a PCB for High voltage: PCB Layers My sister used to decorate cakes as a 4-H project, while I showed chickens and built a computer. She had to create at least six “show quality” cakes a year, plus all the versions that didn’t come out perfect. It turns out you can actually get tired of eating cake, so eventually you just get styrofoam forms and decorate those. It gives you a chance to practice the design before you actually put it on a real cake. Getting the design right might Read Article Why You Should Incorporate Digital Input Sampling in Your Embedded System I particularly enjoy shopping in the supermarket on the weekend. In the grocery section, there are samples of various food products that range from tuna spread to white coffee. While I enjoy hopping from one sample station to another, my 5 year old son shamelessly always asks for a second helping. Sampling in electronics carries a different meaning than leisurely eating a variety of snacks. In an embedded system, digital input signals play an Read Article High Voltage PCB Design for Arc Prevention: How to Manage Pads and Traces: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: High Voltage PCB Design for Arc Prevention. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you think in the comments Read Article The Best PCB Design Software Tools and How They Work Using the right tools can save you lots of time, money, and frustration no matter what type of design you intend to realize. The old adage “work smarter, not harder” definitely applies to printed board design. Great PCB design software will provide the tools you need to work intelligently, instead of frustrating you with awkward features. Your choice of EDA software is subjective to your design needs. Most of the time it comes down to having the Read Article Quality Tips and Tricks To Help You Get Your Layer Stack Right What are PCBs? PCBs are Printed Circuit Boards and they are the heart of everything electronic. The circuit board offer mechanical support and create an electrical connection between several electronic components with the aid of pads, conductive tracks, and several other features which are made from copper sheets and laminated onto non-conductive substrates. The PCB is also a housing unit on which several components (resistors, capacitors or Read Article Manual Routing vs Using an Automated Router: Why Auto-Interactive Routing Is the Ideal PCB Design Solution I have been designing printed boards for a long time. Like most experienced PCB designers, I have my reservations about autorouters. Autorouters have a reputation for being difficult to set up and run, taking a long time to work, and giving questionable results. Often you would put your board into the router in the evening only to find the next morning that the results were not worth saving. I knew designers who would spend hours and hours Read Article How PCB BOM Management Tools Facilitate Efficient Communication Between Departments Many years ago, I was a junior PCB learning the ropes of the trade in a large company. To help me understand the entire product production process, my boss took me on a tour of the manufacturing floor. The people that I met there were not rude per say, but I noticed a subtle attitude of, “Oh, you’re one of them” that puzzled me. The reason for their annoyance I found out later was that they would routinely suffer delays because of bad information Read Article Bill of Materials in Supply Chain Management: Part Inventory Control Sending information to other departments and personnel is a regular part of the PCB design process. For purchasing, their part of this process starts when engineering sends them a bill of materials () for a new design. At this point in the design cycle, the is a preliminary document and it is constantly changing as are added, updated, or eliminated during the design cycle. The problem for purchasing is that this constantly changing data impacts Read Article High Speed PCB Design Considerations: Component Shapes Considerations When starting a high speed PCB design, there’s a lot that must be considered before the design ever gets into layout. Schematic organization, board materials & layer configuration, critical component placement, and how high speed signals are to be routed are all aspects of high speed design that need to be planned for. Often there is one area that doesn’t get as much consideration as everything else, and that is the component footprint shapes Read Article Stripline vs Microstrip: PCB Routing Differences and Guidelines Traces in a PCB are given two possible names based on their location in a PCB stackup: striplines and microstrips. In a PCB, a stripline and microstrip are two different transmission line structures used in a PCB layout. Microstrips and striplines also come in the coplanar and differential varieties, and all of these have certain advantages when used for high-speed or high-frequency signals. If you're looking for a thorough comparison of Read Article Keep Learning, Tackling 3D and Making and Hacking! OnTrack Newsletter September 2017 On Track Newsletter September 2017 VOL. 1 No 6 Welcome to the September edition of Altium’s On Track Newsletter. This month PCB designer extraordinaire, Susy Webb, shares her tireless passion and continual pursuit of excellence in Design Like a Girl. In the On Track video series, John Magyar illustrates why 3D is a truly powerful tool and not just a gimmick for designers. Lastly, we take a peek inside the wild and wonderful world of makers and Read Article PCB BOM Management: Spend Less Time on Your BOM and Reduce Delays in Manufacturing Real-time solutions with management tools Cafeterias in colleges, summer camps, and schools are often known for serving up food that has a consistent quality and similar ingredients. For the kids who are tired of eating spaghetti with meatballs, this approach to food production is a downer. However, from a manufacturing point of view, using standard ingredients with minimal variety makes for efficient production. This is also true in circuit Read Article Facial Recognition Applications in IoT Wearables One of the coolest tech things I saw in movies and couldn’t wait to see in the real world was retina scanning. I want to feel like James Bond or some other spy when I unlock my house or go into my office at work. I never thought biometrics could get any cooler than that, but Apple expanded my horizons the other day. The new iPhone X is equipped with state-of-the-art 3D IOT face recognition technology. Using a variety of sensors, they’re now able Read Article 3D PCB Design: A Gimmick or Feature? John Magyar, an expert in complex PCBs, explains 3D features in PCB design software that help to resolve common problems earlier in the design process. What if routine placement issues could be discovered early? Welcome to the future of PCB design. You can now export a full 3D assembly and that's no gimmick! Learn more about working in 3D PCB design tools here: https://www.altium.com Watch Video PCB Design Tools at Maker Faire Open Source Hardware Summit In response to a grassroots swell of “makers”, Maker Media launched the first Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. By 2014 over 215,000 attendees flocked to their two flagship events in New York city and San Francisco. Over the years, these large events spawned Featured Maker Faires, Mini-Maker Faires and School Maker Faires all around the world. If you’ve not heard of or been to a Maker Faire, I think their website describes it Read Article Pagination First page « First Previous page ‹‹ Page171 Current page172 Page173 Page174 Page175 Page176 Next page ›› Last page Last » Load More
