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We here at Microchip are excited to contribute to the presentation lineup at AltiumLive 2019 in San Diego. Join us this year to hear our very own Bob Martin’s keynote presentation covering prototyping using the Arduino platform, and Pete Wilson’s technical session on wireless design using RF modules. Here’s a summary of what you’ll learn from Microchip this year: In this keynote, Microchip's resident Wizard of Make, Bob Martin, will show us...

Similar to the products developed for naval applications, satellites are subject to specific environmental conditions that must be addressed during the product development cycle. From Radhardened ICs to heat pipes and an extreme emphasis on reliability, PCBs designed for use in satellites are subjected to extraordinary operational issues. This article will describe the challenges associated with designing PCBs used in satellites and the...

Several years ago, one of my top consulting clients was interested in bringing me onto their team as a salaried employee. They did not have any electronics design/testing capability in-house, so they needed to set up a lab to allow me to work for them in their offices, rather than from home. Hiring your first electronic engineer or technician can be a big step for a company that has been outsourcing all of its projects. The company that was...

S.M.A.R.T. Rule First Pillar - Singularity "If we fail to plan then we are planning to fail." -Benjamin Franklin Given a professionally diverse readership composed of many people with differing company structures and situations, my intention isn’t to give a ‘sole’ method or plan that will magically fit everyone’s situation. Rather, I want to give a detailed explanation of how it “could” be done. I aim to give the bird’s eye view of this whole...

Do you need to work with your fabricator every time you start a design? Maybe not. Do you need to work with your fabricator early in the design process for flex and rigid-flex? Yes, I think so, especially if flex and rigid-flex designs are new to you. If you are well-experienced in flex and rigid-flex and have worked closely with your fabricator to understand their materials, preferences, and processes, you probably don’t need to reach out...

  If you’re working on a battery powered project that needs a long service life between charges or battery replacements, you’ll quickly find that every last microwatt of power starts to add up over months of operation. I have worked on some projects in the past that needed to run for months on a single charge of a secondary battery, or a single primary battery that was small enough that simply running the microcontroller at full power would...

Today in the studio, we welcome Carl Schattke, who works for a leading electric vehicle manufacturer. Carl has almost forty years of experience in PCB Design and will teach us about the things he thinks about when designing very complex boards. He’ll discuss what he’s going to cover as a keynote at AltiumLive in Frankfurt, October 21st through 23rd, and he’ll tell us more about a talk he’s co-presenting with Max Seeley from 3M, in which they’ll...