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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...

The component looked perfect. Single-source, yes, but with specifications that exactly matched the design requirements. Engineering signed off and the board went to layout. Then procurement opened the datasheet and saw the end-of-life notice dated three months earlier. Six weeks of rework and a product launch pushed to next quarter, all because no one checked the part’s lifecycle status during component selection. This scenario plays out daily...

Key Takeaways Modern supply chains are design inputs, not afterthoughts: resilience starts at schematic capture. Engineers and procurement teams increasingly rely on AI, regionalization, and transparency tools to manage volatility. Tools like the Octopart BOM Tool and Altium’s design environment help teams plan, automate, and stress-test supply decisions early. Your BOM Is Now Your Biggest Design Risk Component supply chains face relentless...

Understanding Power Integrity in PCB Design: Power Analyzer by Keysight Whitepaper In modern electronics, power distribution is no longer a simple matter of connecting traces and planes. As designs grow more complex, with high-speed digital logic, dense multilayer PCBs, and precision analog circuitry, the way power is delivered across the board can make the difference between a reliable product and one that fails in the field. This whitepaper...

In our first article, we explored how Jira, originally designed for software, can be customized for hardware teams facing physical constraints, long lead times, and cross-discipline dependencies.  The next article builds on this foundation and shows how to anchor project management with Vision Briefs, On-Ramps, and execution cycles.  In this article, we’ll focus on a practical challenge for electronics teams: improving visibility and...

When it comes to electronics manufacturing, few things are as costly and disruptive as a sudden stockout, which contributes to an estimated $50 billion in annual losses for industrial manufacturers due to unplanned downtime. When a critical component is suddenly unavailable during volume production, SMT lines grind to a halt, deadlines are missed, and everyone scrambles to find an alternative part number. The solution lies not in better guesswork...

When you look at the list of mixed-signal ASICs available, the list is quite staggering, but the range of programmability of these devices is basically zero. This is where discrete logic and discrete analog circuits make their way into designs, and they quickly increase the component count required to implement basic functions. Unfortunately, these circuits also have essentially zero programmability unless you implement DACs and add application...