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It every designer’s nightmare: you receive boards from your prototyping run, you power them up, and you suddenly find nothing works as expected. Even worse is a critical failure that causes a short, creating a beautiful plume of blue smoke and the familiar smell of burning plastics and resins. Where do you start when trying to locate problems in your new board? What tools do you need to investigate different types of failure? There isn’t always a...

Ever drive through a winding mountain pass? When I was a student, there was one back road that would wind back and forth as you ascended a small mountain. This style of paving roads is also used to route traces in PCBs. This routing style, called switchback routing, can be used for length matching/delay matching in replacement of, or alongside, other length tuning styles. With all the different length tuning and routing styles available in PCB...

Not all design rules are applicable in every situation, and they are often communicated without context. One particular rule for sizing traces is to always opt for wider traces when possible. Unlike many rules of thumb I’ve seen thrown about, this particular trace rule has some merit. However, when you need to control trace impedance and simultaneously reduce ringing, you need to carefully control the trace width to ensure transmission lines have...

Advanced devices require collaboration among multiple team members to ensure functionality and manufacturability. With embedded systems, this extends beyond a hardware team to include software developers. If you want your new product to be manufacturable at scale, then at some point, you will need to involve your manufacturer in the collaborative process. This is especially true with high speed digital devices and high speed analog devices. If...

One of the best reasons to be in the electronics industry is because of the rapid pace of development. There are several new technologies that are becoming more widely available, namely silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) High Electron Mobility Transistors (also known as ‘FETs’). If you’re an expert in the power electronics field, these transistors are probably familiar. If you’re not and you still want to know what’s new, here’s what...

Graphical representation of a Tokamak fusion reactor (Image source: pixabay.com) Many of us spend a lot of time patting ourselves on the back and telling ourselves how clever we are as a species. We often hear claims that the total sum of human knowledge is doubling every ‘X’ years, where the value of ‘X’ depends on who you are talking to. The inventor and visionary Richard Buckminster Fuller originated the concept of the “Knowledge Doubling...

Photo on top is Ideal-Tek ST-5S Smart Tweezers (Image source: Saelig.com) I must admit that I'm blown away when I think of the test and measurement equipment that's available to electronics engineers these days. I'm not talking about high-end, eye-wateringly expensive tools like multi-channel gigahertz oscilloscopes and logic analyzers that are available primarily for professional engineers working for big companies. Instead, I'm thinking of the...

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. Precursor To help PCB Designers to become better at what they do, the series of Blogs on Concord Pro are broken down by category. Each category walks through the entire process of setting up and efficiently using Concord Pro. Furthermore, at the end of each blog are...

I just heard that the Embedded Vision Alliance (embedded-vision.com) has rebranded itself as the Edge AI and Vision Alliance (edge-ai-vision.com). To be honest, I think this change is absolutely the right thing for the alliance and I also think this is the perfect time for the change. The original Embedded Vision Alliance was founded in 2011 by Jeff Bier and Berkeley Design Technology Inc. (BDTI). Although this is only nine years ago at the time...