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Graphene has long been touted as a wonder material for use in electronics and electro-optics. Still, commercialization and realistic applications have been something of a pipe dream over the last two decades. The physics of this material and its structure give it unique properties that have been predicted and observed repeatedly at the nano-scale, but scaling graphene production and device fabrication have been challenging until only recently...

Vector network analyzers (VNAs) are the workhorses of RF signal integrity measurements and have traditionally been used by microwave engineers to design microwave components and antennas. Today’s digital designers working with ultra-fast signals need to think in terms of mmWave concepts and understand what VNA measurements mean, specifically S-parameter measurements and resonant measurements. You can thank ultra-fast edge rates and high...

Are you looking for a free PCB file viewer that can take all EDA file formats and present them in a tool accessible to every member of the production process? Electrical and mechanical engineers, procurement professionals, manufacturers, and other stakeholders often need to view obscure engineering software formats in a variety of environments. Altium’s PCB viewer lets them view design files normally accessible only in expensive EDA software.  O...

An Arduino board is a great way to include standard functionality in your next PCB. If you want to use an Arduino board in your PCB design software, you’ll need to include Arduino boards as part of your component libraries. This allows you to incorporate Arduino boards into your electronics schematics, layouts, and bills of materials. You can use Arduino boards as the backbone for your next product, or as part of a larger multi-board system...

Protel PCB isn’t gone, it has been rebranded and enhanced as Altium Designer. Altium Designer: The most powerful, modern, and easy-to-use PCB design tool for professional use. You don’t have to look very hard to find software such as Protel PCB design software or Diptrace still in use. Since the mid-1980s, Protel has been used for PCB design in companies all over the world as well as in universities for teaching circuit design and in homes...

If you need to connect multiple boards into a larger system and provide interconnections between them, you’ll likely use a backplane to arrange these boards. Backplanes are advanced boards that borrow some elements from high speed design, mechanical design, high voltage/high current design, and even RF design. These boards are often used in mission-critical defense systems, telecom systems, and data centers. They carry their own set of standards...

RF structures can be complicated to design and layout, particularly because many RF systems lead double lives as digital systems. Getting an analog signal out of a component and into a waveguide for high isolation routing is not so simple as placing a microstrip or stripline coming off your source component. Instead, you need to create a special microstrip to waveguide transition structure to ensure strong coupling into and out of your waveguide...

PCB manufacturing is competitive, and there is plenty of worldwide manufacturing capacity for new boards. If you’re looking for a manufacturer for your next project, it can be difficult to determine who is the best option to produce your board. Different fabricators and assemblers offer different levels of service, different capabilities, and access to different processes and materials. There are a lot of options to consider when selecting a...

Antipads around through-hole vias are a point of contention in modern PCBs, and the debate around the use of these elements in a multilayer PCB is framed as a binary choice. With today’s modern PCBs, it pays to understand the effects of antipads on signal integrity, and specifically on via impedance in a PCB. In this article, we'll look closely at the effects of antipad sizing on via impedance and wave propagation because this metric is the...