Design Libraries

How to Plan Ahead to Meet PCB Disposal Requirements

How to Plan Ahead to Meet PCB Disposal Requirements When I was a kid and learned to solder, I had a mentor that kept an old coffee can on his soldering bench labeled “Lead Waste - DO NOT THROW IN TRASH.” Wire snippings, solder bits, and the random metal detritus that accumulates on a soldering mat all went in there. Apparently, it got full every few years and he took it to a local electronics recycling place to make sure he wasn’t adding any lead or heavy metals to the environment. I was shocked Read Article

How PCB BOM Management Tools Facilitate Efficient Communication Between Departments

How PCB BOM Management Tools Facilitate Efficient Communication Between Departments Many years ago, I was a junior PCB learning the ropes of the trade in a large company. To help me understand the entire product production process, my boss took me on a tour of the manufacturing floor. The people that I met there were not rude per say, but I noticed a subtle attitude of, “Oh, you’re one of them” that puzzled me. The reason for their annoyance I found out later was that they would routinely suffer delays because of bad information Read Article

Bill of materials in Supply chain management: Part inventory control

Bill of Materials in Supply Chain Management: Part Inventory Control Sending information to other departments and personnel is a regular part of the PCB design process. For purchasing, their part of this process starts when engineering sends them a bill of materials () for a new design. At this point in the design cycle, the is a preliminary document and it is constantly changing as are added, updated, or eliminated during the design cycle. The problem for purchasing is that this constantly changing data impacts Read Article

How PCB BOM Management Can Reduce Delays in Manufacturing

PCB BOM Management: Spend Less Time on Your BOM and Reduce Delays in Manufacturing Real-time solutions with management tools Cafeterias in colleges, summer camps, and schools are often known for serving up food that has a consistent quality and similar ingredients. For the kids who are tired of eating spaghetti with meatballs, this approach to food production is a downer. However, from a manufacturing point of view, using standard ingredients with minimal variety makes for efficient production. This is also true in circuit Read Article

PCB Circuit Design Tips: Standard vs. Specialized Component Selection

PCB Circuit Design Tips: Standard vs. Specialized Component Selection in PCB Design As a kid, I was fascinated by hovercrafts. These nearly frictionless vehicles go from land to water without pause and spin 360s on demand like a carnival ride. I knew that the cost of a full-scale build would require mowing every yard in the county, so instead, I started by constructing a homemade radio-controlled model. It worked beautifully on ponds and flat parking lots, but in our hilly corner of the woods, the sleek craft required all of the Read Article

BOM Management Tools and Real Time Part Access: How It Will Help Your PCB Design for Manufacturability

PCB BOM Management Tools and Real Time Part Access: How It Will Help Your Design for Manufacturability Have you ever been so ready to take off on a new project that you can’t wait to jump into it? Of course you have. As engineers that’s part of what makes us tick. We’ve got so many ideas running around in our head that we would rather forego sleep or food in order to create a design. Then it happens, some kind of delay forces us to lock up the brakes on our creative process. There are many scenarios that can do this, but one of the worst is when Read Article

PCB Design and BOM Management: How to Ensure Profitability in Low Volume Manufacturing

Circuit Board Design and BOM Management in Low Volume PCB Assembly What’s the difference between Angry Birds and SpongeBob? I’m probably at an age where I shouldn’t be caring about these things, but choosing the wrong character for my son’s 5th birthday cake could spell disaster. As a designer, you probably can’t relate to my need to carefully consider the repercussions of choosing SpongeBob. However, you might understand it better knowing that I apply the same level of caution when designing for low volume Read Article

PCB Layout Constraints That Help Manage Component Obsolescence

PCB Layout Constraints That Help Manage Component Obsolescence Just about everyone in the world of engineering has heard some variation of the “Iron Triangle” theory. It’s a popular way to talk about what is or isn’t possible among those given the task of getting things done. Basically, it is a philosophy that says you can get something done fast, cheap, or good; pick two. For example, when designing a PCB for an aircraft, cheap goes out the window, fast takes a back seat and quality is paramount Read Article

The Benefits of Having an Automated Bill of Materials in Project Management

BOM Automation: The Benefits of Having an Automated Bill of Materials in Project Management I have some friends who founded a startup company to create and market a brilliant new product. Their product quickly became a success, but all their hard work was constantly undermined by communication issues between departments. It wasn’t long until the engineers found their creative hands tied, purchasing was buried under an avalanche of unreliable documentation, and the product build-in manufacturing was slowed to a crawl from incorrect and Read Article

Flywheel and Flyback Diodes Prevent Electrical Noise in Circuits

Using Flyback Diodes in Relays Prevents Electrical Noise in Your Circuits What is a flyback diode, and how does a flyback diode protect a circuit? When used properly, flyback diodes can reduce electrical noise and prevent flyback voltages from building up. Read Article

How a Bill of Materials Can Improve Your Supply Chain Management

The Benefits of a Bill of Materials In Supply Chain Management Some of the most complicated engineering projects I’ve worked on were made up of multiple layers of sub-assemblies. Before we could order parts for a new assembly, we needed to go through every component in each tier of the final product to ensure that they would meet the rigorous current, voltage, and temperature derating requirements for different customer applications. The first few times I had to do this, it was by merging dozens of excel Read Article

BOM Part Number Management: Why It Should Be Automated

BOM Part Number Management: Why It Should Be Automated If you’ve ever worked with high voltages or have designed a high voltage circuit, you know that they always require careful planning. In my last job, we had been using a particular high voltage power supply circuit for years. When it was initially designed, the board took longer than usual to complete. While its design required some extra finicking, it was worth the effort. Everything was going well until the larger assembly's design was modified Read Article

What Materials to Include in Your Bill of Materials

What Materials to Include in Your Bill of Materials As an electrical engineer, I am constantly impressed with the brilliant designs my colleagues come up with. I’m also constantly shocked to see how mismanaged most of their BOMs are. I’ve been on projects with a huge range of practices for handling a bill of materials. On one end of the spectrum, there was my senior design project, with no BOM at all, just a series of sticky notes my group placed on the front cover flap of our notebooks. Protip Read Article

Why Designing a High Voltage PCB for Rapid Prototyping Is More Effective Than Rushing to Form Factor

Why Designing a High Voltage PCB for Rapid Prototyping Is More Effective Than Rushing to Form Factor Remember that fable we all were told as kids about the tortoise and the hare? The moral of the story was that slow and steady wins the race. In engineering, this is especially true when it comes to creating a consumer product quickly. However, this practice is rarely the approach we take. I personally experienced this when I rushed the design of a dimmer for the IOT market. In fact, I was making two dimmers. The first dimmer was simpler and used Read Article

Designing Controller PCBs

Designing General PCB Controller for your Circuit Board Layout I always thought that to be successful you need to emulate the success of others. When I started my career, there weren’t any single board computers like Raspberry Pi, and no one took Arduino seriously for industrial applications. You can imagine how bad it was the first time I did maintenance on a general purpose controller that I designed. It was a fire alarm controller that had over 50 wires manually screwed onto it. I had to replace a faulty Read Article

How NASA Plans to Use 3D Printed Circuit Board Technology

How NASA Plans to Use 3D PCB Technology and Designs for Space Missions Editorial credit: Tony Craddock / Shutterstock.com Have you noticed how a 3D model has become a phenomenon? People seem to want to 3D print anything they can now. Maybe the 3D printing craze will collide with the Internet of Things and we’ll get a printed smart fork. While other people are writing about the 50 best things you can make with them and then throw away, I’m going to tell you how NASA hopes to use 3D printing. Between a rocket Read Article

Important Features to Consider When You're Comparing PCB Design Software

Important Features to Consider When You're Comparing and Recomparing PCB Design Software Anyone who knows me knows that I hate shopping. This is as true for lab equipment and software as it is for clothes and cars. At my lowest of lows I’ve had meltdowns in the mall, and had to call a cab while my friends were still going strong. Now when I shop, I like to get something as close to perfect for me as possible, so that I don’t have to repeat the experience for a long time. So, if I’m looking for ECAD software, what features and support Read Article