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In this article Zachariah Peterson, founder of Northwest Engineering Solutions, discusses how his company successfully collaborates with mechanical engineers outside of his firm. He shares practices and tools that have been most useful along the way. Judy Warner: Zach, as an engineer and the owner of Northwest Engineering Solutions (NWES), what challenges do you see as most prevalent and problematic for design engineers when it comes to...

A schematic drawing will not only tell your PCB design software what needs to connect where, but it also communicates the purpose of a circuit to other people. It’s easy how to make schematics, but it can be harder to make helpful schematics that can be quickly and easily read and comprehended by the reader. Anyone reading your schematic diagram should not have to try and trace wires around to figure out what they do or need to unscramble a...

Version control gives development teams the ability to do just as its name implies: control which version of a project or data repository is the master version of a project, with all changes between versions being tracked and timestamped. Version control systems are great for tracking and maintaining entire codebases without the old-school copying, pasting, zipping, and emailing steps most PCB designers are familiar with. There’s also the matter...

Electro-Static Discharge (ESD) is essentially the sudden flow of current between two objects with a different electrical charge when there’s a conducting path between them. This could be lightning flowing from a charged cloud down to the ground via the dielectric breakdown of the air between them or that short sharp electric shock you feel when the static electricity that’s built up in your clothing flows to a metal door handle when you touch it...

Suppose your job involves rapidly iterating designs or creating a wide variety of products for clients. In that case, there are some essential tools available that can save you a tremendous amount of time, bringing high engineering risk devices to completion successfully. Whether you’re working on internal projects or developing high mix devices for clients as a consulting or freelance firm, these indispensable tools will help you ship a higher...

I remember when I first started working in a lab and had to occasionally solder wire leads onto metalized contacts. We were working with semiconductor materials, but the same materials can be used in PCB soldering, it’s all a matter of choosing the right blend to fit into the PCB manufacturing process. The PCB manufacturing process involves multiple steps, spanning from bare board fabrication to assembly and packaging. As part of PCB assembly...

It was not long after the first electrical devices were conceived that they were being used in situations where their failure could have disastrous consequences. This could be delivering a fatal electric shock to the user or failing to apply the brakes on a speeding vehicle; electrical devices are used everywhere and for almost every conceivable purpose. Medical devices are now routinely embedded into a patient’s body to regulate their heartbeat...

This article sets out to illustrate a numerical example of a mismatched transmission line and, along the way, uncover the derivation and use of the reflection coefficient. I’m hoping that it will also serve as a reference to come back to the next time you need to calculate reflected voltages or currents. I have often scratched my head trying to recall how to do these calculations. In my impatience, I’ve searched for internet articles showing, for...

As anyone who designs and builds electronic devices knows, the device will generate heat when it’s switched on. Wherever current flows through an impedance, energy losses will manifest themselves as heat, thanks to thermodynamics laws, whether in components, connections, wiring, or the PCB. The greater the loss, the greater the excess heat generated.  While components with thermally enhanced packages are available to help manage any heat...