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As noted in an earlier article, based on class notes from our two-day design course, getting the power subsystem design correct is the most challenging aspect of today’s high-speed PCB design process. A major aspect of this process is modeling the power supply to ensure that it will function properly in the end product. A critical part of this modeling effort focuses on being able to model capacitor impedance vs frequency. This is simple enough...

Previously I built a 5V, 5A regulator for my entry-level cinematography camera, the Blackmagic Ursa Mini Pro G2 4.6K. It features isolated 5V power supplies for the radio microphones and extensive power filtering to ensure the highest quality power throughout the system. My shoulder rig for the camera has several fixed loads, which I don’t want to have to unplug individually when I take the camera off the shoulder rig. Therefore, I’m making a...

Rick Hartley is former senior principal engineer for L-3 Avionics Systems and current principal of RHartley Enterprises, where he serves as an international consultant on signal integrity and EMI issues. With more than 50 years of experience in the industry, the majority of Rick’s career has been spent working in aircraft avionics, telecommunications, and PC boards, and specializing in suppressing noise in analog, RF, and digital circuits.  Rick...

EMI & Noise Control Reading List PCB Design for Real-World EMI Control - Bruce R. Archambeault (Kluwer Academic Publishers Group) - ISBN 978-1-4757-3642-7  Principals of Power Integrity for PDN Design Simplified - Larry D. Smith & Eric Bogatin (Prentice Hall) - ISBN 978-0-13-273555-1 Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineering - Henry Ott (2nd Edition - John Wiley and Sons) - ISBN 978-0-470-18930-6 Digital Design for Interference Specifications...

Everyday we work on routine tasks that take up small chunks of time, slowly building into a mountain of wasted efforts. While object selection might seem insignificant, ineffective selection thousands of times a month adds hours to your workload. Plus, the typical board layout is denser than ever making it challenging to identify and select objects in your design. This webinar focuses on the different selection tools in Altium Designer and their...

Whether you are an individual designer or a team of people, there are always others in the value chain that you rely on to turn your design from intent to reality. Making this happen means you have to collaborate and share. One of the problems is that the way this is done today can be cumbersome, error-prone and inefficient — we haven’t progressed much beyond phone calls and emails, until now. A decade worth of research and development with...

First Things First Before anything else, I must ask a question. “Are you ready for your next step?” By now, you should have set up the following: Roles  Permissions Component Revisions Lifecycle  These will be the building blocks that we use to structure our Component Library throughout this blog. It is essential to have them in place now rather than later. Because it is difficult to change them once we begin to actually start components. ...

If you pay attention to electronics and photonics industry publications, 2020 seems to be the year of quantum computing. Companies ranging from IBM to Intel have sunk vast sums of money into developing proprietary technology for their quantum computing platforms. There are plenty of foreign competitors (especially in China). The research landscape tends to focus on scale, error rate, algorithms, and materials in the development of quantum...

Whether you’re an individual designer or part of a team, there are always others in the value chain that you rely on to turn your design from intent to reality. Making this happen means you have to collaborate and share. One of the major challenges is that the way this is done today can be cumbersome, error-prone, and inefficient. In many instances, we haven’t progressed much beyond traditional phone calls, emails, and ad-hoc meetings... Until...