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Getting design files to customers used to require a thumb drive, DVD-RW, or emails before we had the cloud. Even though today’s cloud platforms are immaculately secure and they allow a range of files to be easily shared, there are times where you should limit the data you’re sharing to only the critical files required. For PCB designers, this means either sharing entire design projects or sharing individual files with your manufacturer, customers...

Printed circuit boards are fun to design and lay out, but a PCB will need an enclosure to hold it mechanically stable. PCB enclosures can be purchased off-the-shelf, or you can create a custom enclosure design using MCAD software. No matter which route you take to create your enclosure, you’ll need to import your PCB layout into MCAD tools to ensure your board and components will not interfere with the enclosure. When you’re working with a...

If you have experience working on PCB design teams, either in a single location or remotely, you've probably seen your share of successful and failed projects. Any project can fail or be severely delayed for a variety of reasons, and sometimes, the stars must align to ensure everything is delivered on time and under budget. Even after making many mistakes that caused project delays and fragmented team members, I'm still learning what it takes to...

As departments find deeper ways to collaborate, the bill of materials (BOM) now proves its value more than it may have once appeared. It gives engineers, procurement managers, logistics operators, and manufacturing specialists a blueprint for lean and efficient printed-circuit-board (PCB) production.  A BOM is more than a mere documentation of a product’s components, though, as it also holds vital information on different product functions; the...

Nothing hurts more than doing everything right in a hardware design, only for your board to fail because of a single footprint. I’ve been through this, so don’t repeat my mistakes. Learn how to manage ECAD libraries for consistent PCB layout design. Key Takeaways A single mismatched footprint can cost weeks of delay, $20,000 in lost production, and a client relationship. Even minor oversights can destroy trust and schedules. Disorganization...

Processors allowing implementation of custom logic have traditionally been physically very large and difficult to develop. This has normally been appropriate because they are used for chip prototyping or to build application processors for embedded systems requiring high I/O count and compute resources. To help engineers balance between system size, cost, and development effort, this article gives a comparison of the options for building digital...

Making an ASIC the traditional way is no easy task, but now designers can take control of their component designs with programmable logic. There are three options for designing ASICs: CPLDs, FPGAs, or mixed-signal processors. These three approaches allow a designer to essentially create a custom processor which can even be programmed on the fly. If none of the available off-the-shelf component options work for your system, which type of...

An increasing number of developers are starting to run Linux natively on their machines. This becomes a point of frustration when they discover tools, such as Altium Designer (included in Altium Develop and Altium Agile), are not available for Linux. Fortunately, you can run the full Windows version of Altium Designer inside Linux with a little bit of a compromise. In this article, we’re going to walk through getting Altium Designer running...

For PCB designs that require multiple microcontrollers, microprocessors, or FPGAs, power/boot sequencing can be a key factor in getting everyone to work in unison. In this article, we’re going to revisit the self-organizing MCUs example aspect of Shrinking Arduino Projects: Atmega328P and Nothing More. Rather than manually boot up each Atmega328P device with jumper wires, we will be using the Renesas GreenPAK kit to automatically perform the...