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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...

Whenever I’ve engaged with a startup client that wants to understand board design and manufacturing costs, they often get surprised when I tell them the major PCB cost drivers and start giving some ballpark estimates. For a startup hardware company, or even a major enterprise that does not normally engage in electronics manufacturing, the numbers can be surprising, especially for low-volume runs. There is this perception that electronics...

In previous articles, I have touched upon the use of adjacent plane layers rather than discrete capacitors. In essence, when it comes to the successful PDN design, the ground plane and power plane have some parasitic inductance, which contributes to the overall PDN inductance. This value is then related to the PDN capacitance and is very low. For this reason, the capacitance provided by adjacent plane layers is able to support the very high...