Part 2: Why Your PCB Design Review Process Is Obsolete and What You Can Do About It As we established in Part 1 , the PCB design review and collaboration practices have room for improvement in many organizations. To address this, we developed Altium 365 . Let's examine how running a PCB project through Altium 365 compares to other methods. One source of truth, visibility, and version control To start using Altium 365, you need to create a workspace and a centralized location for your design files, libraries, and collaboration Read Article Can You Design a Rotation-Proof Connector Pinout? There are times where your connector pinout needs to be adaptable and reversible. What’s the easiest way to do this? Use a rotation-proof connector in your PCB. Read Article What is PCB Star Grounding and Why Would Anyone Use It? PCB star grounding can encourage bad design practices that lead to radiated EMI emissions in your PCB layout. Read Article What is Multi-board Design? Want to know about multi-PCB design? Learn more about what is multi-board design and how to use native 3D design with ECAD MCAD collaboration aids complex PCB layout. Read Article Controlled ESR Capacitors: Should You Use Them for Power Integrity? I can’t think of a single product I’ve built that doesn’t require capacitors. We often talk a lot about effective series inductance (ESL) in capacitors and its effects on power integrity. What about effective series resistance (ESR)? Is there a technique you can use to determine the appropriate level of resistance, and can you use ESR to your advantage? Like many answers to important engineering questions, the answer is “it depends.” One type of Read Article Designing a Multiphase Buck Converter for an RF Power Supply Consider a multiphase buck converter for the regulator stage in your RF power supply. Alongside envelope tracking, you can ensure high efficiency power delivery and transmission. Read Article What Causes Gibbs Signal Ringing in High-speed Channel Simulations? Gibbs ringing is both a measurement artifact and a calculation artifact that arises in band-limited channels. Make sure you understand how this arises due to transform and convolution operations. Read Article How the Gibbs Phenomenon Produces Measurement Artifacts The Gibbs phenomenon is a measurement artifact that can be mistaken for real signal integrity problems like ground bounce, ringing from reflections, or resonance on short lines. Read Article What is PCB Component Creation? Learn more about PCB component creation and how you can easily create components with the best CAD features in Altium Designer. Read Article State of PCB Design Education with Zachariah Peterson Zach Peterson shares his insights about the availability and accessibility of education related to PCB design for high school and university students. Watch or listen on the go now. Read Article Efficient Heat Dissipation with SMD Heat Sinks Keeps You From Dropping PCBs In electronics, there is the possibility that your PCB can get pretty hot due to power dissipation in certain components. Whenever a component reaches an extreme temperature that goes beyond a component's safe operating range, its lifetime will be greatly reduced or the component may fail immediately. The heat-producing component being defective means the entire PCBA will need to be scrapped. There are many things to consider when dealing with Read Article How to Design a Connector Pinout For Your PCB PCB connector pinouts can be customized to fit your power, signal, and ground requirements. Learn how in this article. Read Article Which Type of Opto-Isolator Is Right For Your Circuit? An optoisolator is an electronic device that can be used to pass information between a diode without passing an electrical current. Because there is no need to directly pass voltage or current between the inputs and outputs in an optoisolator circuit, these components can be used to provide electrical isolation in two regions in a PCB. Opto-isolators act as a protection mechanism, ensuring that harmful electrical currents cannot flow across the Read Article PCB Silkscreen Guidelines PCB silkscreen helps ensure your board is easy to read and test, and it aids assembly by clearly indicating component locations. Read Article Ceramic Capacitors Maximum Voltage and Derating Operating just about any type of capacitor below its maximum rated voltage ensures a longer operating life. Such components’ performance will degrade in response to the application of voltages approaching their rated limit and exposure to high temperatures. By choosing to limit the applied voltage, such effects can be reduced. Ceramic capacitors are one of the most common types of capacitors that are in use today thanks to their compact packaging Read Article Resistor Power Derating to Improve Mean Time Between Failure All resistors have a specified power rating that determines the maximum energy they can convert without its performance degrading or the component failing. Read now to learn more. Read Article Methods of Circuit Protection Overvoltage, overcurrent, and heat are the three most likely events that can destroy our expensive silicon-based components or reduce our product’s life expectancy. The effects are often quite instant, but our product might survive several months of chronic overstress before giving up the ghost in some cases. Without adequate protection, our circuit can be vulnerable to damage, so what should we do? Or do we need to do anything? 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