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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...

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 system designs, for everyone from large flagship technology companies to small startups. Over the years, he’s established an extremely skilled cross-functional engineering team that covers every aspect of end-to-end product design. In this interview, he talks about the critical aspects of truly...

Anytime you place a component in a schematic sheet or PCB layout, the component gets assigned a reference designator (sometimes shortened to "refdes"). This alphanumeric code is shorthand for a specific component and it helps the design team properly communicate specific components between team members, inside design documents, and within printed circuit design software. Reference designators are not just random sets of letters and numbers, they...

In today’s fast-paced world where iterations of electronics are spun at lightning speeds, we often forget one of the most critical aspects of development: testing. It’s always easy to overlook testing simply because it’s the last stage that prevents us from releasing our product. In product development, we constantly find ourselves in the camp of “good enough” versus “exhaustively tested.” This situation usually happens because we don’t have time...

If you’re an electronics designer or you’re just beginning your career as an engineer, the PCB stackup is probably one of the last things you’ll think about. I’ve seen professional designers jump into a new design  with full force and enthusiasm, only to end up totally forgetting about some of the critical board stackup details. Simple items like PCB copper thickness and board thickness can get pushed to the back burner, but you’ll need to think...

Take a moment to think about your schematic and your PCB layout: what if you had to manually draw out wires and nets in a PCB after you’ve already created them in the schematic? Electronics schematics form the foundation of your design data, and the rest of your design documents will build off of your schematic. If you’ve ever worked through a design and made changes to the schematic, then you’re probably aware of the synchronization you need to...

It would be nice if, at least in the US, the power that came from the wall was truly noise free. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and although a power system can appear to output a clean sine wave, zooming into an oscilloscope trace or using an FFT will tell you a different story. When you take dirty power, put it through rectification, and then pass it through a switching regulator, you introduce additional noise into the system that further...