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When it’s time to share your design data with your manufacturer, it’s like taking a leap of faith. If you can get a complete and accurate data package to your manufacturer, hopefully you won’t lose sleep waiting for your boards to come back from the fab shop. Sending off a complete documentation package might seem as easy as placing your fab files in a zip folder, but there are better ways to ensure your manufacturer understands your project and...

One of the most difficult and frustrating things to arise when traveling to a foreign country is the language barrier. Communicating a simple greeting can sometimes seem like a big hassle. The same thing is true for different CAD tools. When your tools aren’t speaking the same language, you’re going to run into problems. Bridge this gap by building out your component libraries with everything it takes to truly define a component, including 3D...

One of the most difficult and frustrating things to arise when traveling to a foreign country is the language barrier. Communicating a simple greeting can sometimes seem like a big hassle. The same thing is true for different CAD tools. When your tools aren’t speaking the same language, you’re going to run into problems. Bridge this gap by building out your component libraries with everything it takes to truly define a component, including 3D...

Today’s PCB designers often need to live a double life as a circuit designer, which might involve hand calculations or simulations to understand circuit behavior. Whether you’re working with digital circuit or analog systems, you can use time-domain simulations to better understand how your system starts up and reaches a steady state. Your SPICE simulator has you covered with a simple but powerful simulation: transient analysis. Without going...

When you need to build products that have common circuitry and components, you shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel. Design reuse is a common practice among teams that need to build PCBs with many similar circuit blocks or component groups, and it enables you to take a modular approach to your designs. With some careful PCB design reuse strategies, you can cut down your design time and produce higher quality designs. Altium 365 makes all this...

A power supply’s efficiency is simply the ratio between the energy it consumes and the energy it supplies. No device can be perfectly efficient; there will always be losses in heat or electromagnetic fields. The leading causes come from active component losses (MOSFET and diode switching losses) and, to a lesser extent, from passive component losses (resistors, capacitors, and inductor impedance losses). It moves towards utilizing higher...

In this  series of articles, we’re looking at some of the different types of Serial Communication Protocols available for transferring data between devices. The articles will cover a few of the more popular protocols and standards in use today, and at the end of this series, we will recap and compare the advantages and disadvantages of each. We hope this information will prove valuable next time you need to implement a serial communication bus in...

In this article, we will be looking at the popular UART device. It’s not a communication protocol but rather the physical circuit used in microcontrollers or stand-alone ICs to transmit and receive serial data. It supports the series of articles we’ve produced to look at some of the different types of Serial Communication Protocols available.  Serial communications are the perfect mechanism for transmitting information between devices such as...

In true engineering spirit, let’s start by establishing the scope of this article. The intention isn’t to tell you exactly what to do if you need to mass-produce the device you’ve designed or show you what changes to make. This intention is to explore the mindset you need to adopt and the critical thinking you’ll need to do if you need to either design a device from scratch for the mass market or turn your one-off prototype into a format that...