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I received an excellent question on my LinkedIn recently, and this relates to how designers and procurement heads have to work together to prepare a design for scaling. Pre-production review and scaling into volume production involve many dimensions of design testing, evaluation, and modification. Assuming everything in the design has passed review and no more prototype spins are needed, you can then look to optimize and design for cost...

Introduction In this article, we will discuss the basics of crosstalk in PCB design and how to reduce crosstalk in your own designs by following simple guidelines. Crosstalk Basics Simply speaking, crosstalk is the unwanted transfer of energy from one element (the aggressor) to another element (the victim). These elements can be traces, components, planes, and so on. This energy transfer happens due to capacitive and inductive coupling, as...

In this episode of the OnTrack Podcast, we are pleased to host a thought-provoking conversation between Tech Consultant Zach Peterson and Dr. Philip Voglewede, Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Marquette University and Director at the Omron Advanced Automation Lab. Zach and Phil have a very intriguing conversation about the role of automation in the current and future industrial landscape. Anyone...

Electronic devices all need to contain integrated circuits and PCBs, but there is always much more that’s required to turn a PCB into a real product. Integrated circuits provide the main functionality on most PCBs, but they are not what creates a complete product that you can sell on store shelves. Real electronic product designs require much more, and ultimately, they require reaching across engineering disciplines. When you reach across...

Series and parallel termination are the most common resistive termination options for digital signaling. The reason is that resistance is a wideband quantity and does not start to be affected by parasitics until well into the GHz range. At the channel bandwidth associated with most digital signals, there are cases where an unterminated line actually needs termination, even if there is no impedance specification in the interface. As both options...

Altium and Ansys are redefining the way ECAD and Simulation engineers work together. Today, we are joined by Joao Beck, Altium's Director of Enterprise Technical Marketing, to give us all the details. The Altium-Ansys Digital Bridge is a seamless, digital connection between ECAD and Simulation. This is just another step in Altium's quest toward a digital ecosystem. Make sure to watch the entire episode so you can fully understand what's coming...

If you follow what I do in signal integrity publications and in seminars, then you have probably seen several articles on calculating lossy transmission line impedance using analytical formulas and calculators. Using a calculator and some numerical techniques is much simpler than setting up a 3D electromagnetic field solver. The calculators you’ll find online will omit very important information, so it is worth investigating whether you can use...

Even if you aren’t using top-of-the-line design software, you’ll still notice something very important in your PCB footprint layers: solder mask and paste mask openings. These will be placed into stencils and used to fabricate and assemble your PCB. With designers sometimes finding themselves needing to create their own components, it’s worth asking, what is the right value for mask expansions to set in your PCB footprint? The next question that...

An Introduction to Baxandall Active Volume Control Inspired by Douglas Self’s book on audio electronics (‘Small Signal Audio Design’) and his power amplifier design consisting of a massively-parallel array of NE5532 op-amps, I set out to design a headphone amplifier that uses similar techniques but scaled down due to the lower power requirements. The resulting amplifier utilizes many NE5532 op-amps (the first version used 44 in total!) and is...