Real-Prototyping World There’s something to be said about the difference between designing your system on an evaluation board compared to designing it using the board on which your system is actually going to ship. One of the problems with using an evaluation board is that it’s a really nice environment to work in. Too nice, in some respects. The processor company wants you to have a positive experience with their chip so the eval board has all the bells and whistles Read Article Riding Technology Waves There’s tremendous value in being able to utilize the latest and greatest technology on the market. Of course, the leading edge is sharp and there are ways you can cut yourself if you aren’t careful. In general, though, having the flexibility to choose where you ride technology waves enables you to better balance the overall performance, cost, and power efficiency as you design systems. I remember an industrial embedded system I was optimizing Read Article Quit Bouncing Around Bounce on a single-pole, double-throw (SPDT) switch with normally closed (NC) contact opening and normally open (NO) contact closing (Image source: David Ashton) In an earlier column -- Say "Hello" to the LogiSwitch Workbench -- I introduced a rather clever shield for the Arduino Uno. This little scamp allows you to break out all of the Arduino's analog and digital input/output (I/O) pins, along with the 5V, 3V3, and GND pins, to three full-size Read Article All Hail the Evo Compute Module The Evo Compute Module (small board) mounted on an EvoTray (larger board) (Image source: Alorium Technology) I was just chatting with my chum Jason Pecor at Alorium Technology . We bounced around from topic to topic with the agility of much younger men. At some stage in our conversation, Jason mentioned a forthcoming product called the Evo Compute Module, which really grabbed my attention. I'll tell you all I know in a minute (it won’t take long) Read Article Accelerating Board Bring Up There’s that moment when you power up the first production board for a new design. It doesn’t matter how perfectly the prototypes operated. The question, “Is it going to work?”, still hangs in the air. At its best, this process is exciting. At its worst, you find yourself with an intermittent but persistent problem that means you need to spend more time and money. Today, there are a great variety of off-the-shelf boards available to jumpstart Read Article Go From Maker to Pro We are in the Golden Age of development. Never before has it been possible for individuals to design complex electronic systems with as much ease, simplicity, AND functionality. Someone with a hobby in electronics used to stick to simple projects like turning on LEDs or making a radio hum to life. Now nearly anyone can build sensor-based hardware that can be controlled through a phone app and submit data to the cloud for remote analysis and Read Article Creating High Pin Count Schematic Symbols Quickly Making schematic symbols is quick and painless when you use regular expressions and leverage Altium Designer’s expansive toolkit. Read Article Power Plane and Ground Planes: Should You Use Your PCB Power Plane as a Return Path? Power planes (sometimes called a power layer) and ground planes are important for more than just distribution of supplying power. When defining reference planes, both with impedance controlled routing and in managing return paths, your stackup might force return currents to pass into a PCB power plane before being coupled back to a ground layer. Even though you define a GND reference layer as a the basis for your impedance-controlled trace width Read Article Lies Your Fabricator May Have Told You In some of our previous articles , we have talked about the various things that go wrong when a board design is turned over to the fabricator for manufacturing. Sometimes, the things that can go awry are due to design errors but the bulk of them can be ascribed to errors incurred during the fabrication process. This article will describe the errors that can be encountered and what, if anything, can be done to avoid them. We have previously Read Article Using Prepreg vs. Core for Controlled Impedance Routing When I was first learning the finer points of PCB design, my first impression that the core was some type of special material that did not have close resemblance to the other layers. This is not necessarily the case, but designers need to work within the core/prepreg stackup constraints imposed by the PCB manufacturing process. Although you may be constrained as to how the layers in your board are arranged, you can choose which core/prepreg Read Article Methods For Calculating And Measuring Impedance, Part 2 In Part 1 of this article, I reviewed the four basic types of PCB transmission lines and the various equations used for calculating the impedance associated with those lines. Part 1 also discussed why those equations only tell part of the story, and why there are other influencers including 2D field solvers; knowing the glass-to-resin ratio and knowing the frequency at which transmission lines will be used that impact the process of ensuring that Read Article Methods For Calculating And Measuring Impedance, Part 1 In a previous article, I talked about the various transmission line properties that affect impedance . In this two-part article, I will address the methods used for calculating impedance . Included at the end of Part 1 is a list of 2D field solvers along with brief descriptions of their capabilities. Part 2 of this article will address other design aspects that influence impedance, including the frequency at which impedance should be measured Read Article Transmission Line Properties That Affect Impedance—Hidden Features Here and in several other articles published on the Altium Resource section of the company’s website, the topic of transmission line impedance has been addressed from a number of different perspectives. I have addressed transmission line impedance previously in my article, The Evolution Of Simulation Technology and Impedance and, it might seem that we may have exhausted the field of potential information that can be provided on impedance, however Read Article The Right Termination, Of The Right Size, At The Right Place In recent articles , I have addressed reflections , what they do to signals on transmission lines and how to control them through the use of terminations, serial and parallel. One area of confusion that continues to come up in our on-site classes regards the actual placement of terminators. This article will address this topic and hopefully provide some useful guidelines. Note: I am only addressing series and parallel terminations. Most of the Read Article How the Fiber Weave Effect Influences High Frequency Signal Integrity Orienting traces and choosing the right weave style can help compensate for the fiber weave effect. Watch out for resonances at high frequencies. Learn more in this latest PCB design blog. Read Article Pros and Cons of Orthogonal Trace Routing in Multilayer PCBs What would limit your use of orthogonal trace routing? Like most design questions, it depends on your signal speed and stackup, as well as placement in the PCB layout. Read this latest PCB design blog by expert Zachariah Peterson to learn more. Read Article Say "Hello" to the LogiSwitch Workbench The LogiSwitch Arduino Uno Workbench Proto-Extender Kit (Image source: LogiSwitch.net) As the Indian novelist Savi Sharma once said, "Everyone has a story." While this is undoubtably true (my mother certainly has lots of them), it's also true that some peoples' stories have more richness and complexity than others. Take my chum, Mike Pelkey, for example. If you perform a Google Search on "BASE Jumping" -- that is, parachuting from a fixed Read Article Pagination First page « First Previous page ‹‹ Page81 Current page82 Page83 Page84 Page85 Page86 Next page ›› Last page Last » Load More