Design for Manufacturing (DFM)

The Importance of Compliance Awareness in Circuit and PCB Design

The Importance of Compliance Awareness in Circuit and PCB Design I had an English professor once who was a lot of fun, but man, his requirements for essay writing were brutal. Making a decent grade required a ton of work. I had to check and recheck my paper’s content to make sure that every detail he asked for was painstakingly covered. These tedious rituals, though annoying and painful, helped teach me how to be thorough with my research. This was something that came in handy when I began my career and had to Read Article

Quality Tips and Tricks To Help You Get Your Layer Stack Right

Quality Tips and Tricks To Help You Get Your Layer Stack Right What are PCBs? PCBs are Printed Circuit Boards and they are the heart of everything electronic. The circuit board offer mechanical support and create an electrical connection between several electronic components with the aid of pads, conductive tracks, and several other features which are made from copper sheets and laminated onto non-conductive substrates. The PCB is also a housing unit on which several components (resistors, capacitors or 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

Multilayer PCB Design: Manufacturing Boards for High Voltage PCBs

Multilayer PCB Design: Manufacturing Boards for High Voltage PCBs One of my favorite movies is the original Shrek. It was thrown into the nerd vernacular of my friends and siblings, along with more traditional sources of quotes, like Star Wars. One scene particularly stands out, when Shrek explains to Donkey that ogres, like himself, are complex creatures. “Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers.” Donkey points out that not everyone likes onions, but everyone 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

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

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

How to Prevent Silkscreen Placement Errors in PCB Manufacturing

How to Prevent Silkscreen Placement Errors in PCB Manufacturing Make sure to leverage the DRC system in your CAD software to catch and solve PCB silkscreen errors. Read Article

Top 5 Money Saving Techniques for PCB Design

Top 5 Money Saving Techniques for PCB Design “It can be done fast, it can be done cheaply, or it can be done well. Pick any two.” A lot of engineers use this maxim to explain why their project is behind schedule or over budget. And there is some degree of truth to it. If you want a high-quality design, it’s either going to take a lot of money or a lot of time to figure out how to do it for less. However, if you know a few money-saving techniques ahead of time, they can help you keep your Read Article

PCB Editor View Modes

PCB Editor View Modes PCB editor view modes allow designers to locate and correct errors in particular areas of the board. Altium Designer features multiple ways to view your design, allowing you to be most eﬃcient and to help avoid errors. These diﬀerent PCB editor view modes have allowed users to find and fix design problems, such as why a flex board does not fold, why components are on the wrong layers, and why dead copper is not being shown anywhere on the board Read Article

Capturing Key PCB Design Elements in the Design Document

Capturing Key Design Details in PCB Documentation One of the most important yet often avoided aspects of documenting a design is the formal design document. Too often we finish the design, generate fabrication, assembly, and validation documents then consider the job done. Properly capturing the system specification, design intent, design process and traceability back to the specification is a time-consuming and arduous yet very necessary task. The design document must capture all aspects of the 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

PCB Circuit Products: Should You Design for Repair?

PCB Circuit Products: Should You Design for Repairing? As an engineer, I always feel like it’s a personal failing when I have to call someone else in to fix my stuff. Whether it’s electronics or the occasional bit of haphazard woodwork, I can’t ask for help until I’ve tried to sort it out. Plumbing, however, is another story. Then I call for help immediately. The problem with the impulse to fix your own stuff is that a lot of companies don’t actually want you to. I can’t count the number of times Read Article

PCB Design for Manufacturing: Prevent Via Defects by Talking to Your Manufacturer: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites

PCB Design for Manufacturing: Prevent Via Defects by Talking to Your Manufacturer: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: PCB Design for Manufacturing: Prevent Via Defects by Talking to Your Manufacturer. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let Read Article

The Top 3 DFM Problems That Affect Every PCB Design: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites

The Top 3 DFM Problems That Affect Every PCB Design: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: The Top 3 DFM Problems That Affect Every PCB Design. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you think in the Read Article

Should You or Your Manufacturer Specify Every Aspect of PCB Construction?

Should You or Your PCB Contract Manufacturer Specify Every Aspect of Construction? I was finally taking a trip to China; something I had been planning for years. I was about halfway through the flight when all of a sudden, my vacation excitement turned to dread. I realized that back at home, where I am PCB assembling, there might have been a critical board mistake during assembly. I was regretting not specifying that reflow profile. Then again, maybe I was regretting over specifying it? Any mistakes on my board were made days Read Article