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Short circuits are not a common defect, but the presence of a short circuit can ruin a portion of a device or cause a total failure. Short circuits arise when conductors are bridged, resulting in intermittent problems or permanent failure. They can arise in a PCB during fabrication due to design errors, or they can occur after a product has been placed into the field for a significant period of time. If you locate a short circuit in your...

Most startups that are still at the bootstrap or seed funding stage have very little money to burn. Some hardware startups consist of a few designers investing their life savings into a new product, and they don't have the luxury of infinite prototyping to build a working system. Because hardware comes with so many constraints, hardware startup founders need to get their budgets in place early in order to convice investors to contribute money...

ChatGPT has quickly become the killer app for AI, and it’s made generative AI extremely easy to access and use. So of course we had to ask, can you use ChatGPT for PCB design tasks? Does it provide useful answers or results when doing some technical research? We’ll look at what the system can and can’t do in this article. In the forthcoming guide, I want to stress that I am just using ChatGPT in its native form (Pro subscription, but no plugins)...

Do you want to design better products? Effective and efficient collaboration between mechanical and electrical design is crucial. This whitepaper is for executives and designers whose companies design electromechanical products with printed circuit boards (PCBs) and who are looking for ways to increase the quality of their designs while eliminating wasted effort. Mechanical and PCB designers share in the success of the final design. The problem...

In an impedance matching network, the goal is to tailor the resistance, capacitance, and inductance of the circuit such that power or voltage transfer to a load is maximized. Controlling these factors around an impedance matching circuit in a PCB is all about placement and sizing of traces and ground, as well as matching these to the pads on your discrete components. To eliminate additional parasitics from the pad size and traces connecting to...

Today we're thrilled to be joined by John Watson, Customer Success Manager at Altium. He and Tech Consultant Zach Peterson chat about the importance of education for designers, what it's like working with students, and what new opportunities there are for PCB designers in today's market. Listen to the Podcast: Download this episode. Watch this Episode: Key Highlights: Introduction to John Watson, Altium Customer Success Manager John...

In my recent power amplifier module project, I showed the high-level view of how to place and route various components in a power module that used some basic components. In the module, SMA edge connectors were used to bring in power and bring out the generated RF signal at 6.3 GHz. But there was one thing I forgot to include in one of my SMA connector footprints: ground clearance below one of the solder pads in the SMA footprint. I’m a bit...

Have you been considering flexible circuits to solve a PCB design constraint?  There are several advantages to using flexible materials.  Size, weight, the ability to bend around corners and to flex during use to name just a few.  If would like to learn more about these benefits, check out my previous blog post. If you have read my past blogs, you will notice one common theme for those new to flexible circuit design, communicate with your...

Some designs make use of edge plating around the exterior of a PCB, where the sidewalls of the PCB substrate are plated up with copper. The copper plating used in RF PCBs is placed for multiple reasons, such as providing a ground connection to a shielded enclosure or containing electromagnetic fields. If you determine you need to include edge plating, how should you specify this in your PCB layout and manufacturing data? This article will give a...