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In the broadest application of the term, “front-end engineering” refers to an engineering design approach used to control project costs and thoroughly plan for a project. The PCB product development process refers to all the steps taken prior to the board being moved from the design to the fabrication process. This article will review those steps, define what happens in them and what the critical elements are for each of them. Subsequent articles...

  OnTrack Newsletter September 2020 VOL. 4 No 3   AltiumLive 2020 Virtual Summit: Meet the Speakers Since announcing that AltiumLive 2020 will be a virtual event, our team has been busy assembling a world-class line up of speakers and industry experts to offer insights into the best...

Altium’s commitment to advancing electronic design extends far beyond the pale of great printed circuit board (PCB) design software. Altium features multiple educational initiatives designed to support high school Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) teachers and students, along with programs to support college students and industry professionals. To further our efforts promoting high school STEM programs in the era of...

Robotics, undersea vehicles, space science, and Electrical Engineering instructor... Eli Hughes has led an interesting career. Now an acoustics guru and co-founder of Tzero, he joins OnTrack to discuss guitar pedals, the secret of overcoming imposter syndrome, and his company’s surprising approach to beer fermentation monitoring.  Eli will be speaking during AltiumLive 2020’s three-day event on the Road to Becoming a Full Stack Hardware Engineer...

This article is part of a three-part introductory series on the controller area network bus, better known as CAN bus: Part 1: An Informal Introduction Part 2: The Protocol Part 3: Designing CAN-bus circuitry Introduction In the first article about the CAN bus, we looked at the physical layer and the different hardware standards, such as HS-CAN and low-speed fault-tolerant CAN. If you have yet to read it, you can find it here. The most...

Almost anywhere you look these days, be it academic textbooks, presentations at technical conferences, websites for various products linked to printed circuit board (PCB) design or technical articles posted on your favorite engineering design and automation (EDA) website, the primary challenge in designing today’s high-speed systems is firmly tied to the design of the power delivery system (PDS). It is the “make or break” functionality for a...

Altium Concord Pro™ as a standalone product and brand name has been discontinued and the capabilities are now available as part of our Altium enterprise solutions. Learn more here. Of all the regulated industries you can work in as an electronics designer, medical devices come with stringent industry and governmental standards that must be followed. If your new product is intended to diagnose or treat diseases, and if you want to market it to...

This article is part of a three-part introductory series on the controller area network bus (better known as CAN bus): Part 1: An Informal Introduction Part 2: The Protocol Part 3: Designing CAN bus circuitry Meta-Introduction to the CAN Bus Over the past few decades, the industry has consolidated to a limited number of commonly adopted communication buses, from local communication standards such as SPI, I2C, and UART to RS232 and USB that...

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I love collecting data. Temperature sensors seem so simple on the surface, but there’s a lot more to them than you might have initially thought, including a huge range of sensor types. In this series, we’re going to build a range of PCBs which will cover all the temperature sensor types and circuits to implement them. We will also build a pair of host microcontroller boards to collect data and evaluate the sensors a...