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If you’re a freelancer and you’ve led or managed a complex PCB design project, the need to involve your customer in the product development process may not be obvious. Your customer is probably a project manager at a bigger company, so they’ll be overseeing the progress of the project and leading communication with you. If you work on a small team or as part of a large organization, involving customers in product development can be time-consuming...

While DDR5 was still being finalized, DDR6 was just being discussed, even as designers who were already comfortable with DDR4 were grappling with a new version of this classic RAM technology. Fast forward to today, and DDR5 RAM sticks have just hit the market, and meanwhile the biggest names in semiconductors are working on DDR6. Designers working in the ultra-fast domain will be taking clock and data speeds to new levels to get even more data...

High speed PCB interconnects have continued to remain an active challenge in modeling and simulation, particularly when dealing with broadband signals. The IEEE P370 standard is a step towards addressing the challenges faced by many designers in determining broadband S-parameters for high speed structures up to 50 GHz. Although this standard has been in the works since 2015, it finally passed board approval and appears as an active draft standard...

When you’re working through a complex PCB layout, it always helps to know the shortcuts you can use to stay productive. Altium keyboard shortcuts, and keyboard + mouse shortcuts, can help you easily walk through your PCB layout during design and as part of final checks during a design review. The other very useful set of features in Altium are the view options, which help you focus on essential structures in the design. Here are some of my...

Chris Denney is CTO of Worthington Assembly and cohost of the ‘Pick, Place, Podcast’ podcast. He joins OnTrack to tell us about his talk, which is titled “Your Manufacturer Is Stupid - Help Them”. Learn the five tentpole problems your manufacturers have to deal with, and how avoiding these simple issues will speed your projects through assembly.  Listen to the Podcast: Download this episode (right click and save) Watch the video: {"preview...

Companies working on the newest hardware platforms can't instantly scale from zero to millions of units. They will need to build PCB prototypes in order to qualify their new systems and ensure the system will meet many compliance metrics. Prototyping will be the first attempt to prove an engineered system will work as intended, and that it can produce functionality that aligns with user experience expectations. Startup companies who are just...

Anytime you’re looking for a fabricator to produce your new design, you should ensure they have a robust quality control program. Personnel need to be fully trained to spot defects, inspection and testing equipment need to be in-place and functioning, and processes for documenting and reporting design defects should be standardized. Whenever defects are found during manufacturing, it’s possible they may relate back to a design choice that was...

In a previous post, we focused on making a simple active amplifier using the TI LM386 op amp. We’ll be continuing from the end schematic of that tutorial, then walking through the process to create a finished PCB layout in Altium Designer®. This layout contains an LM358 op-amp circuit that runs at audio frequencies, as well as a number of other components. The component count is low enough, and the frequency range is low enough that we can...

Look back through the history of science and engineering, and everyone upgrades or modifies their designs as technology advances. Complex engineering projects require a lot of documentation to ensure everyone stays on track, and to ensure a design can be rolled back to an earlier version. In particular, electronics projects can get extremely complex, and it’s not uncommon for team members to rollback a project to an earlier version. When you’re...