PCB Assembly and Fabrication Classes at Michigan Tech Curious about What Universities offer Printed Circuit Fabrication classes? Learn what one professor at MTU is doing to innovate in electrical engineering student education. Read Article Designing Your Circuit Board for Boundary Scan PCB Testing You can avoid some manual circuit tests with a boundary scan test On simple boards with few components and surface-level traces, you can probably test all aspects of your board by hand without much difficulty. Imagine you needed to do this with a multilayer PCB, and you’ll see that there are many aspects of a manufactured and assembled board that cannot be tested by hand. With more advanced boards, where traces are embedded in the interior layers Read Article PCB EMI/EMC Guidelines: Meeting EMI/EMC Standards in Your Designs What if you set two cell phones next to each other and suddenly neither of them worked properly? Thankfully, this doesn’t happen because designers and manufacturers made serious efforts to ensure these devices comply with EMC standards on conducted and radiated EMI. Any device should comply with EMC standards before it makes it to the marketplace. While this sounds complicated, you have a number of simple design strategies to help your next Read Article Kramer-Kronig’s Relationship to PCBs The Kramer Kronig relationship is basically a way to go back and forth from the real and imaginary parts of a function. That’s it. So when someone says “blah blah blah must conform to the Kramer-Kronig relationship”, it’s a statement that is stating the obvious. Similar statements are, dogs must be part of the canine family and thus canis genus or petrol must have come from petroleum deposit on earth. Both correct and mildly interesting Read Article Long Range WiFi for Remote Sensors and Connectivity If you need to have network access from sensors which need more than a little bandwidth, cellular can get quite expensive. There are quite a few long-range wireless systems that are targeted towards sensors, however, trade bandwidth for range. If you need to stream video, send pictures, or have a constant stream of data from a range of sensors these wireless links might not be suitable. WiFi has rather limited range by comparison but does have Read Article Requirements Management and Quality Functional Deployment “Ending up in the wrong place is the result of bad directions, not bad driving. Product failure in the marketplace results from errors in requirements, not implementation.” - Thomas L. Musto, Chairman, IBM Corporation (Retired) A definition of QFD: Quality-Functional-Deployment (QFD) [literal translation of the Japanese characters] is an analytical method to help you transform customer needs (the voice of the customer [VOC]) into engineering Read Article Changing PCB Reference Planes During Routing in Multilayer Boards Vias with annular rings for reaching an interior PCB layer If you’re a new designer and you take a look at some boards in common electronic products, you may not even realize they are multilayer boards unless you know exactly where to look. The fact is that more complex devices simply do not allow every single trace to be placed on a surface layer, thus signals must be routed within an interior layer in order to make the desired connections. With Read Article Why Doesn’t Every Application Use Rigid Flex Technology? Why Doesn’t Every Application Use Rigid Flex Technology? Good Question! Rigid-flex technology is a hybrid between rigid boards and flexible circuits,m combing the most favorable aspects of both. The flexible portion helps solve space, weight, and packaging issues because it can bend, fold, and flex in either installation (flex to install) or end use (dynamic flex). The rigid portion supports dense component areas, allowing higher layer counts Read Article PCB FR-4 Materials Are Not All The Same In the PCB industry, “FR-4”.is a common designation for laminate materials. To a certain extent, FR-4 as a specific type of laminate is one of the many myths promulgated throughout the industry. This blog will address the history the term FR-4, what it really means, the various quantifiers associated with it, and the characteristic issues of concern when selecting design-specific laminates. The Origins of FR-4 If you research FR-4 as a term Read Article Microvia Technology and Beyond for HDI Design HDI PCBs, ultra-HDI, packaging, substrate-like PCBs, and highly advanced chip-on-board can all require microvia structures once electrical connections become very dense. In these designs, higher density chipsets and packages have driven the demand for more advanced fabrication capacity that can support microvias into advanced stackups. But in addition to microvias in standardized HDI stack ups, there are more advanced interconnects available for Read Article Scope Your PCB Design Data Management System for Success One of my favorite quotes from Zig Ziglar is “Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.” I like that - doing the best we can with what we have. I’d also add that to be successful with anything, we need realistic expectations and an understanding of precisely what Read Article Weekly Digest: Design Data Management Dive deep into design data management this week with expert articles and VP of Marketing Lawrence Romine on the OnTrack Podcast. Learn all about the modern, streamlined experience that Concord Pro offers and the performance enhancements in Altium Designer 19.1 in this discussion between Romine and Judy Warner. New this week we also have Mark Harris, creator of the Celestial Database library, joining on as expert contributor to share his wisdom Read Article 1:9:48 Speed Up Your PCB Routing Watch Video PCB Dimensions: Tolerance and the IPC Here's where we boldly confront a grim reality - nothing is perfect in the real world. We do our best to maintain accuracy in our circuit board designs, but the manufacturing process produces imperfections. Our CAD systems assume a drill is perfectly centered in a round pad. It never is. We declare specific trace widths, and when we measure them on an actual board they are always slightly thinner or thicker than expected. Multiple layers are Read Article IPv6 and the Internet of Things For a while now we’ve been told that IPv4 addresses (you know, the network addresses that look like 192.168.1.1) are running out. and, approximately three decades from now, there aren’t going to be enough of them left to go around. While we have reached the point of IPv4 being fully allocated at a high level, it's still easy to buy or lease IP addresses in any region, and ISPs are not turning down new customers because they cannot allocate them Read Article Autonomous Device for the Preventive Measurement of Soil Condition My name is Piotr Lazarek. I’m a second-grade student of the secondary school “Filomata” in Gliwice. For over 5 years, I have been interested in physics, informatics, and technology. One year ago, when I was thinking about the focus of my project, I considered the idea of building a Mars rover. After further thought, I realized that there are dozens of competitions around the world in which hundreds of such vehicles have already been presented. I Read Article Culture Shock: Agile and Individual Accountability for Mechanical Engineering An engineer's prime responsibility has traditionally been to design products for form, fit, and function. It's worked just fine, or well enough, up to this point, right? Well, that depends on how you look at it. A substantial percentage of organizations today report missed deadlines, delayed projects, or canceled projects altogether. Products are changing, and this brings new challenges to the industry. They're becoming less mechanized and more Read Article Pagination First page « First Previous page ‹‹ Page100 Current page101 Page102 Page103 Page104 Page105 Next page ›› Last page Last » Load More