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Happy Holden, a legend in the PCB Industry and one of our favorite Altium Industry Expert contributors gives us a trip to his 53 years of experience in the industry. From a chemical engineer, and PCB manufacturing expert to an educator with his countless contribution to the PCB industry’s wealth of knowledge through his books, column, and keynote presentations. Listen to Podcast Download this episode (right-click and save) Watch the Video ...

When designing we don’t start from scratch every time we need to create a design, we reuse what we’ve already done. Reusing common circuitry is a great way to get a head start on your project and speed up development. This webinar we’ll take a deeper dive into design reuse blocks and discuss some practical recommendations to effectively use them in your designs. We’ll go over: How to create a new reuse block. Placement of a reuse block in...

When designing we don’t start from scratch every time we need to create a design, we reuse what we’ve already done. Reusing common circuitry is a great way to get a head start on your project and speed up development. This webinar we’ll take a deeper dive into design reuse blocks and discuss some practical recommendations to effectively use them in your designs. We’ll go over: How to create a new reuse block. Placement of a reuse block in...

When designing we don’t start from scratch every time we need to create a design, we reuse what we’ve already done. Reusing common circuitry is a great way to get a head start on your project and speed up development. This webinar we’ll take a deeper dive into design reuse blocks and discuss some practical recommendations to effectively use them in your designs. We’ll go over: How to create a new reuse block. Placement of a reuse block in...

When designing we don’t start from scratch every time we need to create a design, we reuse what we’ve already done. Reusing common circuitry is a great way to get a head start on your project and speed up development. This webinar we’ll take a deeper dive into design reuse blocks and discuss some practical recommendations to effectively use them in your designs. We’ll go over: How to create a new reuse block. Placement of a reuse block in...

Impedance control, impedance management, and controlled dielectric are three terms that are loosely interchangeable and refer to different methods for setting the impedance seen by signals in a PCB. Impedance calculation tools, such as free online tools and your EDA programs, can help you calculate trace impedance and you can get a very nearly accurate value for impedance. However, the rubber meets the road during manufacturing, and the design...

Trace resistance, trace impedance, plane resistance, and plane impedace: when do you need to worry about all of these quantities? Resistance and impedance both are important in small traces and fat rails on a PCB, both internally and externally. Sometimes a new designer entering the world of impedance controlled buses might think they have a trace resistance target, when really they have a trace impedance target. While in power electronics, we...

Printed antennas are a very popular option for RF PCBs as they maintain the low profile of a planar device. If you look at some Bluetooth/WiFi capable MCUs, you will likely see an inverted-F antenna along the board edge to provide Rx and Tx in a compact form factor. In this article, I’ll show how to design one of these antennas, including some design equations, and where to place these antennas for maximum radiation efficiency without...

As part of circuit design, it is always advisable to perform some circuit analysis in the frequency domain, time domain, or Laplace domain to understand circuit behavior. The time domain and Laplace domain are related in one area: the transient analysis, where we look at what happens to a circuit as it experiences fast changes in its excitation. From looking at a transfer function in the Laplace or frequency domain, it may not be obvious what the...