How to Find Equivalent ICs in Your PCB When I was younger, I would routinely open up old or broken electronics just to see how they worked. I didn’t start to understand how they worked until I was older, but I always marvelled at the mass of components and the complexity with which they were laid out on a circuit board. I would even have fun connecting from different devices in the hopes that I could resurrect a broken device. ICs in your PCB have a number of specifications that must Read Article PCB Manufacturing Tolerances: Adding Fabrication Tolerance Options to Your Manufacturer Deliverables Much as we would like, no manufacturing process is perfect. Every process produces slight errors in part sizes or placement, and PCBs are no different. Since some PCB applications have very tight tolerances, you’ll need to specify your tolerance requirements for your manufacturer. Let alone maintaining secure understandings of solder mask and solder placement, material thickness specifications, or any surface mount components - designating your Read Article How Integrated PCB Design Software Helps you Manage Documentation and Outputs If you’re like me, then you’re a hardware fanatic. You’re the type that enjoys creating and watching your ideas come to life before your eyes. The last thing you want to do is sit behind a desk and create change orders, bills of materials, and assembly plans for your new product. What if there was a way to cut down the time required to generate these important documents? With deliverables and documentation requiring standardized formats and Read Article SMART System for Data Management I have seen it, and perhaps you have too, where excessive design problems and too many re-spins of a PCB design can be attributed to just one thing; improper data management. I worked with a company once that considered half a dozen board spins acceptable just to iron out all the library problems. These kinds of problems can be greatly reduced and even eliminated with careful data management. The SMART system spells out a data management process Read Article 43:17 Professional Library Management Watch Video 31:18 Altium Designer Productivity: Jump Start your Altium Designer Projects Creating a new PCB project in Altium Designer can be quite a bit of work, especially if you want all the bells and whistles on it. The same goes for the production of CAM data at the end of the project. In this presentation, Casper dives deep into this matter and explores several strategies for setting up a coherent system of templates, libraries, design rules, output jobs, etc. that will help you jump start new designs and race to production. He Watch Video 42:31 Challenges in the Design of Lab-on-PCB Platforms Lab-on-Chip technology aspires to shrink biomedical laboratories in few cm microchips, in a technological revolution step analogous to the introduction of computer technology in the 20 th century. In this presentation Dr. Moschou provides an overview of this technology and its impact on healthcare. She focuses on manufacturing techniques for integrated Lab-on-Chip biomedical diagnostic chips and in particular the Lab-on-PCB technology that has Watch Video 1:25:04 PCB Design Best Practices: Routing Techniques in Altium Designer Explore methods for advanced routing in this presentation with expert Mike Creeden of San Diego PCB and David Marrakchi. View the presentation slides: Sign up to pre-register for AltiumLive next year or try Altium Designer today. Watch Video 1:21:20 PCB Design Best Practices: Advanced Stack-Up in Altium Designer View the presentation slides: Sign up to pre-register for AltiumLive next year or try Altium Designer today. Watch Video 41:17 Parts Stress and Derating: Thermal Analysis & Electrical Stress Derating Integrated in Altium Designer Imagine that you are at a ski site and you seat on a ski lift, which can carry a max of 60kg according to the manufacturer specification while your weight is 66kg. That is only 10% above the maximum allowed weight. Will you worry? Of course. A good ski lift designer will use a safety factor and will design it several times stronger which can hold for example, 300Kg taking into account the possible weight of the skiers. In electronics it is the Watch Video 45:02 Multichannel Design in Altium Designer Do you need eight identical A/D converters on one PCB? Or do you have several similar DDR3 memory banks on your FPGA design? Save time and minimize design risk using "multichannel" design features inside Altium Designer. This session will be a live, hands-on demonstration using Altium Designer, showing concepts and implementation of simple multichannel designs on schematic and PCB levels, then advancing to more complex approaches. We will Watch Video 2019 Five Tech Predictions — The Decade of Disruption We’re coming in for a wild ride in 2019. The last few years have been pretty crazy, and 2019 looks to continue to amplify this highly innovative and disruptive trend. While some may be nervous about trends in technology such as artificial intelligence, I'm still quite optimistic. The most long-term successful aspects of our civilization are those that rip apart on a regular basis. Frequent disruption allows for people to start anew and create Read Article Student Rocket Team Oronos Polytechnique Shoots for the Stars with PCB Designs In this interview I talk with Nathanael Beaudoin-Dion, Avionics lead for the Oronos Polytechnique Rocket team from Polytechnique Montreal Technical University. Each year in June, Oronos competes in the Spaceport America Cup, the world’s largest rocketry competition which takes place in New Mexico at the only commercial spaceport in the world. Enjoy this article as well as the photos of their rockets and videos from this inspiring team. Judy Read Article Draftsman: What’s New in Altium Designer 19 Draftsman® has been a valuable asset to designers since Altium Designer 16. Although some users may have found it to be incomplete due to their unique board requirements, Draftsman has helped many designs go to production. Since its introduction Draftsman has evolved more and more into what it is today: a robust, stable, and powerful PCB drawing editor, specifically made to help designers automate their fabrication and assembly drawing process Read Article OnTrack Newsletter: Why Use a Service Bureau? Multilayer Design Tips, Steps to a Good Design Release - January 2019 OnTrack Newsletter JANUARY 2019 VOL. 2 No 9 “AT YOUR SERVICE” Insights from a PCB Design Service Bureau Companies and design teams look to professional PCB design service providers to support their product development for a variety of reasons. In this article, we talk with Scott Miller, CEO of Freedom CAD, about what dynamics, benefits, and potential concerns come into play when contracting with a design service provider. READ FULL ARTICLE TRICKS Read Article The Implications of Going Fileless A few weeks ago, we covered the general advantages of switching from a desktop-based environment to the cloud for collaboration . Emails can get lost. Attachments can be deleted or forgotten. Merging multiple changes is difficult. The cloud addresses all of those challenges in collaboration. Now, we talked a lot about files and the challenges that come with them in that post. Frankly, the issues in that post are relevant to almost any scenario Read Article What is SRAM? PCB Design Tips and How to Prevent Data Loss SRAM loses its data when power is removed. One of the best inventions in editing software is the autosave feature, which prevents Murphy’s Law from striking at the worst time. Decades ago, I nearly cried when several pages of an important university assignment were literally wiped out, as the non-existence of the autosave feature was made worse by my reluctance to hit the ‘Save’ button. In electronics, you risk losing the entire data stored in a Read Article Pagination First page « First Previous page ‹‹ Page106 Current page107 Page108 Page109 Page110 Page111 Next page ›› Last page Last » Load More