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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...

When it comes to memory capacity and how it’s incorporated into the present day and next-generation design, much like every other aspect of high-speed design, it’s all about accessing large amounts of data at very high speeds. The evolution of double data rate (DDR) memory has been pretty dynamic over the years. The original DDR was first introduced in 1998 followed by DDR2 in 2003, DDR3 in 2007, DDR4 in 2014, and DDR5, which has an estimated...

One of the many benefits of using polyimide flexible material is that it is bio-compatible, making it critical in many medical electronics applications. Using a PCB with gold traces and conductors on polyimide instead of copper conductors provides a fully biocompatible option. Wait, what? Gold conductors, not gold-coated copper conductors? Yes! Someone recently commented that it took a significant amount of digging and internet searching to...

Single-board computers offer an interesting way to get started with a project that needs more computing power than a microcontroller. Whether you’re looking to develop something which will have an embedded microprocessor running a Linux system, or you’re looking to build something lower volume and make use of an embedded processor module, or make the single board computer the basis of your project there’s something available for everyone. Single...

Steve Sandler, electronics simulation and PI guru, prolific author, AEi Systems founder, and president of Picotest, joins the OnTrack Podcast for a “hold onto your seats” discussion of how he came to simulate the International Space Station for NASA, the intricacies of the James Webb Space Telescope, his flash of insight while improving WEBENCH®, modern board level issues, and his secret life as a pizza chef.  Steve will have a significant role...

Recently my database library has been seeing a large influx of new Altium Designer users who have recently switched to Altium from other EDA packages. As a result, I see a lot of beginner questions about using Altium from people who are working on their first project. This project is designed as an introduction to Altium to take a simple board from concept to ordering panels. I wanted to make the project something that would be useful, rather...

If you’re doing anything with S-parameters, you’ve run into causality problems. The first time hearing your S-parameters are non-causal is an uncomfortable experience. A customer may say, “your S-parameters fail my causality tool. Please fix them and send me new data. Thanks.” Thanks indeed. After getting that message, you probably went to your resident SI expert, Google, and typed in causality.  When you finish reading what Aristotle has to...

When it comes to today’s complex multilayer, high-speed PCB designs, one of the most critical aspects of the product development process focuses on power subsystem design. For that portion of the design, the goal is to make the PDN impedance as low as possible (a few milliOhms) across a broad range of frequencies. While determining that the PDN impedance of the power subsystem adequately meets the final PCB’s performance parameters, there are...