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Listen to the Podcast: Download this episode (right click and save) Watch the video: EMC expert Ken Wyatt joins us in this episode to answer frequently asked EMC questions—a sneak peak to his EMC Book Series. EMC book series: Volume I: Create your own EMC Troubleshooting Kit What inspired you to write this book and why is this information important to your clients? Will you share some examples of common “blindspots” you observe with...

Anytime an experienced design engineer brings up transmission lines, questions about propagation behavior and losses start flying around the room. What causes transmission line losses? How can you design to minimize them? How are losses calculated? These are great questions for the new high speed designer, and once these points are understood, the deficiencies of typical transmission line calculators become obvious. So, in order to give new high...

All design teams have the idea or intention of creating a centralized place where the team can access and use the same design information for their own purposes. We’re talking about projects, components, libraries, symbols, models and so on. Very quickly though these file systems break down, there are too many people making too many edits with no quality control. The reason all these efforts fail is due to a lack of structure, standardization...

The majority of our PCB designs sit as a single PCB under our Altium projects (i.e. .PrjPcb file). Now and then, we design using variants with different stuffing options. It seldom happens that we have a single project that requires multiple PCBs with various stuffing options, but when it happens, a lot of us tend to get stuck. All too many times, I have seen designers fork (i.e., copy and paste) a project and then add slight variations to the...

One of the biggest hurdles big companies, individuals, and startups face when creating new PCB designs is component creation, and specifically footprint creation. Designing footprints is a job most people hate. It’s tedious, time-consuming, and doesn’t result in much except, well, a footprint. Companies now realize this pain point and offer designers free, well-designed PCB footprints. Why would they spend their time doing this? Imagine Company A...

In Hardware in the Loop Testing: An Introduction, we reviewed what hardware in the loop testing (HIL) is, how a setup would look, and why we would want to integrate this into our project design. This article will walk through an example project of a board designed in Altium Designer and run through a DevOps flow using hardware in the loop testing against its firmware. Design Before setting up any hardware in the loop configuration, we need a...

The next stage in the evolution of mobile telephony is here with the roll-out of 5G. The designer looking to incorporate functionality to handle 5G signals into their circuits will face some challenging issues. So, what’s so special about 5G? The main change in the jump from 4G to 5G is the frequency band at which signals are transmitted. For 4G, this band covered 0.7 GHz up to 2.5 GHz. For 5G, this new band is an order of magnitude larger, with...

All design teams have the idea or intention of creating a centralized place where the team can access and use the same design information for their own purposes. We’re talking about projects, components, libraries, symbols, models and so on. Very quickly though these file systems break down, there are too many people making too many edits with no quality control.  The reason all these efforts fail is due to a lack of structure, standardization...

All design teams have the idea or intention of creating a centralized place where the team can access and use the same design information for their own purposes. We’re talking about projects, components, libraries, symbols, models and so on. Very quickly though these file systems break down, there are too many people making too many edits with no quality control.  The reason all these efforts fail is due to a lack of structure, standardization...