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In engineering, we often adopt hundreds of mental shortcuts in order to keep the complexity of the topics we tackle to a manageable level. If we were to run a quantum-physics simulation every time we flash an LED, we would never get anything done. Yet, many of these shortcuts and rules-of-thumb were created in times past , when the electronics industry was radically different than what it is now. Today, we are going to unlearn what a capacitor...

Introduction As engineers, we sometimes sit high on our pillowy chairs, looking at the nitty and gritty of the industry — such as the fabrication of the PCB — with a bit of nonchalance. The truth of the matter is, when studied in-depth, PCB fabrication is an extremely complex technological topic that deserves recognition as the most fundamental part of PCB engineering. Unless connectors, conductive adhesive, wire-bonding, or zebra-tape are used...

When it comes to PCB design and the topic of electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), the industry insider who is always at the top of the list is Dr. Todd Hubing. He has spent a number of his years in both academia and industry. He is a professor emeritus at Clemson University and has his own consulting firm, LearnEMC through which he provides training and engineering consulting services. Today, Todd focuses on the automotive industry and the...

In my previous blog post, I wrote a guide for selecting components to build your own engineering computer. This year I want to do things a little differently by offering more concrete component suggestions to build up an ideal computer for you. In the past year AMD released their new generation of processors, while the consumer level CPUs were a pretty typical step forward, the higher end workstation processors have completely changed the market...

In an ideal world where ideal products are developed, we would never have any issues resulting from any step in the design, fabrication, assembly, test and field operation processes. But in the real product development world that we inhabit, it is a fact that some level of undesired quality and reliability issues will occur. We continually look for novel ways to address these manufacturing issues especially as the components and the PCBs where...

I’ve talked about COM and channel analysis in previous blogs, and I’d like to continue the discussion with more visual aids and some example code to enable readers to do some analysis themselves. To start, let’s review what COM is and a high level overview of how COM is calculated. COM is a signal-to-noise ratio of voltage at a point in time. The point in time is the sampling point, and the available signal is the voltage of the pulse response...

Have you ever opened up an old design and wondered how much of it was still usable? Maybe you were contacted by an old client, and they want you to provide some updates on an old design. No matter what the situation is, there are times where updating old PCB designs with new parts makes sense. If done correctly and when armed with all the right information up front, you can cut down the total design time while preserving the best parts of your...

After my Reddit AMA with Altium, there were a lot of questions from students and graduates asking what they could do to improve their skills and show they are worth hiring. I suggested working on projects that would help cement their skills as well as show their experience with design - I wrote an article with suggestions on getting started on projects and some project ideas. In this article, we’re going to look at the implementation of one of...

I mentor a graduate engineer who recently had their first encounter creating a high-density layout PCB for a design project. As a professional engineer, this was an interesting experience to witness how they approached this task. When it was finished, I asked my mentee what they had learned during the project. Their feedback is quite enlightening, so I thought I would share each of the points raised with a wider audience. During the schematic...