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The electronics lifecycle is a funny thing in that it relies so heavily on component lifecycles. Despite this relationship, every electronic product lifecycle follows a similar track as any other product. New products start with early adoption, later rise with sustained growth to peak adoption, and fade as new products become available with better features. Once you accept this fact, you can determine how to plan out your design and business...

Communicating design intent to the fabricator is one of the most critical steps in the product development flow as it can impact your ability to construct a product correctly and quickly the first time. During this webinar, you'll sharpen your knowledge about how to effectively document, and communicate design information to fabricators, allowing for rapid volume production of a product without design re-spins, complex email chains, or numerous...

Communicating design intent to the fabricator is one of the most critical steps in the product development flow as it can impact your ability to construct a product correctly and quickly the first time. In this on-demand webinar, you'll sharpen your knowledge about how to effectively document, and communicate design information to fabricators, allowing for rapid volume production of a product without design re-spins, complex email chains, or...

In a number of previous articles, I have addressed the challenges encountered when designing boards with 16-layers and above. These are the kinds of complex PCBs found in high-end servers, switches, and the cloud titan products that support the ever-growing Internet needs. However, many products don’t require these types of complex boards with high layer count. One example is the tens of millions of four-layer PCB motherboards manufactured each...

I was impressed that, right out of the box, the stock design rule checks (DRCs) in my copy of Altium 20 pretty much covered all the bases on how to make a “standard” printed circuit board (PCB). Altium Designer defaults to “10 mil” rules, which means that the standard spacing and widths of copper tracks is 10 mils. What's more, most of the other spacings also default to 10 mils. This includes track to track, pads to tracks, through-holes to other...

Understanding the power dissipation of an individual component, an electrical block, or even the whole electronics system is essential for electronics engineers. It is important not only to avoid exceeding the maximum limits of components but also to calculate unknown parameters in input or output sides because power dissipation is related to system voltage and current. In this article, I describe my practices for analyzing power dissipation in...

The OnTrack Podcast welcomes John Coonrod back to the show. John is Technical Marketing Manager at Rogers Corporation and a senior engineering professional with a rich background in PCB design, fabrication, processing, and modeling. John also has extensive experience with circuit materials, making him the ideal candidate for the topic of today’s podcast: insertion loss. Listen to the Podcast: Download this episode (right click and save) Watc...

GPS-capable devices range from your phone to your smartwatch; simply type in your destination and follow the directions. Simple, right? According to the Washington Post, we should all stop using GPS as it’s ruining the navigation centers of our brains. Despite the neurological effects on perception and judgment, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) aims to find alternatives to GPS to provide redundancy. What started as a defense...

A couple of months ago, I purchased an entry-level cinematography camera: the Black Magic Ursa Mini Pro 4.6K G2. I'm planning to use it for project videos, factory tours, and trade show interviews with it mostly being mounted on a shoulder rig. In addition to the camera itself, this requires a surprising number of devices to be powered. To save having lots of batteries to keep track of, I want to run everything off the main camera battery...