How to Design Stable Micro SD Card Power Circuits in PCB Layouts PCB designers often have the tough job of balancing perfection in design and keeping costs down. For PCB designs dealing with storage medias, like micro SD, neglecting simple terms like “hot insertion” or “inrush current” can result in a prototype that imperfect and costly. My philosophy is to keep my hardware designs simple. I am quick to discard any components that seem superficial in my design. Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that Read Article PCB Design Guidelines for High-Frequency Circuits in Car Radar & 5G Applications One of the latest evolutions in next generation of 5G PCB design guidelines is being driven by two emerging technologies, 5G networks and advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) enabled cars. Both of these technologies use something long feared by PCB designers, the extremely high-frequency (EHF) band. Read on and prepare your boards for a high-frequency future. This morning I saw a very strange sight while walking down my street. A long Read Article Why Would Anyone Migrate from Mentor Xpedition Enterprise to Altium Designer? Many users of Xpedition Enterprise didn’t choose it: it was inherited in an acquisition or packaged in a bundle with other products. Now they find they have expensive support costs and many features that they never use. Plus, the tool UI are old and tired, making design more time consuming than it should be. Moving to Altium Designer® gives you a modern, efficient and unified UI, fast and efficient routing, and superior data management. A few Read Article Which IoT Communication Protocols Are Best Suited to Your Design Requirements For IoT products, the interoperability question depends on the communications protocol you use, since most products can’t communicate with systems using a different protocol. The protocol you choose will also affect your hardware. For example, transmission distance will determine your available IoT modules, power requirements, and shape the network configuration for your system. There are a huge number of protocols to choose from. New versions Read Article FIRST Robotics Competition Makes STEM Students into Superstars Over 25 years ago, FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) founder and prolific inventor, Dean Kamen, envisioned a high school robotics competition that rivaled the energy and excitement of the Super Bowl. An event that would turn science students into superstars and infect them with an unshakeable passion for STEM activities and careers. Chris Jennings has an infectious enthusiasm for the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), as well as a rich history with Read Article PCB Designer Cherie Litson: Accomplished BSEE and Master CID Instructor Cherie Litson is an accomplished BSEE and Master Instructor for CID and CID+ training at Eptac. She has enjoyed a long career as a PCB design professional and now spends her days training and certifying other designers. Here she shares how she became a designer, her thoughts on differences between men and women in business approach, and what advice she would offer to others thinking about a PCB design profession. Warner: Cherie, can you tell us Read Article How Low Power Wide Area Networks Are Enabling IoT Systems LPWANs can enable something like a “smart” city. What do civil engineers love, but electrical engineers hate? Concrete. This thing that makes up the base of our physical world often confounds the electrical signals that are the foundation of our digital world. Parking decks, malls, and underground structures all suffer from bad signal coverage. Without some kind of window or repeater, you’ll rarely get good coverage in these areas. That’s Read Article The Challenge of Grounding Altium Designer provides you with the variety of methods you need to solve all different grounding challenges in all different design types. INTRODUCTION Grounding has proven to be one of the greatest challenges in modern Printed Circuit Board PCB grounding design. Circuits continue to become more complex over time, as new technologies make them smaller, and we continue to make the transition from analog to digital. And these smaller, more Read Article Altium Designer 17.1: The Latest Version of Intuitive Design Technology is Here Altium Designer® 17.1 was tailored specifically for today’s engineer. We understand that industry pressures to build more advanced, more efficient products can oftentimes mean a lag in the technology required to accommodate these demands. Our focus was to address these present-day challenges and fully equip designers with the necessary tools for optimum design. The pressure is on for you! You have to get to market in less time with more features Read Article Over-The-Air Connectivity Means Quick Updates, but New Security Challenges Thanks to the accelerating pace vehicle systems are being computerized, updating and securing control firmware is a new responsibility for automotive manufacturers. Over-the-air connectivity means crucial patches, especially those closing security holes, can be silently pushed to thousands of cars without user intervention. That said, it’s important to realize that an over-the-air solution presents a double-edged sword: if not implemented Read Article Biodegradable PCBs: Will They Really Help With PCB Waste Disposal? Isn’t the expansion of the PCB industry incredible? In the last 100 years, we’ve gone from using brass wire and pieces of wood to etched copper traces and fiberglass substrates. New industries like the Internet of Things (IoT) and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) in cars are accelerating that growth. There are millions of PCBs in existence today, and that number will only continue to grow. The funny thing is that we design a printed Read Article Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles: Pros and Cons of Multiple Sensor Fusion Think back to when you were a child, how did you think the future would look? Spaceships, flying cars, internet connected eating utensils? We have many of the things I hoped we would, but somehow cars have lagged behind. I was expecting to see flying cars zooming through the sky and driverless cars whizzing through the streets. I don’t have a solution for flying cars, but there is something that’s making unmanned autonomous vehicles a reality Read Article How to Choose Communications Modules in Your IoT Products A lot of my friends are engineers and we are constantly talking shop. If you’re in the mood for hearing about weird IoT, then it’s always a good idea to ask what project they are working on. I’ve stopped asking what programs they’re using since everyone is learning Python. Seriously, everyone. We talk about what’s fun at work, it’s usually design, but sometimes it’s soldering. We talk about what’s terrible at work, and it’s usually component Read Article IoT Security: Physical Layer Security for IoT PCBs Internet of Things security will be a big issue as the IoT expands. IoT security is definitely an issue getting more attention with the proliferation of devices and services coming to market. As the number of IoT products grows there are greater security risks. You’re not helpless to stop them, though. There are several methods that can mitigate physical security risks for your IoT PCB. These include shielding your board from EMI, designing for Read Article How Ultrafast UV Lasers are Improving HDI PCB Design Layouts Don’t let your manufacturers use Kylo Ren’s lightsaber - too unstable and too many defects. Do you remember the first time you saw Star Wars? I was 12 and it changed my world forever. I’d seen my future. Instead of a car, I would fly a spaceship. Instead of being an accountant like my father, I would be a lightsaber-wielding Jedi. Sadly, I turned out to be neither a Jedi or an accountant, but a humble PCB. Lasers still have a place in my life Read Article Why You Need Integrated Circuit Simulation: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites gives 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: Why You Need Integrated Circuit Simulation. 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 Why Version Control Should Be Implemented in Your PCB Design Software Everyone’s worst nightmare - the blue screen of death! Getting back into the flow after a business trip is never easy, but my return this week has been particularly challenging. We have a time critical contract with our client, so everyone on the project is operating at >100%. I was staying on track until I opened my Board design software and saw that someone had made changes to my layout. They removed two of the four tines from my smart fork Read Article Pagination First page « First Previous page ‹‹ Page182 Current page183 Page184 Page185 Page186 Page187 Next page ›› Last page Last » Load More
