Design for Manufacturing (DFM)

Flexible Circuit Base Materials

Flexible Circuit Base Materials Question: As someone new to designing with flex materials, what is important to understand about the base materials? For people new to calling out flex materials, it can be a little intimidating. Just like their rigid material counterparts, there are so many options to choose from, it can be mind-boggling. But, also just like their rigid material counterparts, once you learn the “basics”, most designs will fit within common parameters. Once those Read Article

Printed Circuit Fabrication

Introduction to Printed Circuit Fabrication for the PCB Designer Want to learn about printed circuit fabrication? Learn from expert Lee Ritchey in this article. Read Article

Preparing for Manufacturing with PCB Panelization Software

Preparing for Manufacturing with PCB Panelization Software If you work in manufacturing or you plan to produce a new product, productivity is the name of the game. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the focus has been producing more widgets per man hour, and PCBs are no different. When you’re bringing a new product to market, why pay more for your order than you need to? One way to improve productivity in a PCB manufacturing process is to use the proper panelization scheme. If you have the right PCB Read Article

Draftsman: What’s New in Altium Designer 19

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

How to Design With a DP83848C Ethernet PHY

How to Design With a DP83848C Ethernet PHY In my university days, high-speed internet was non-existent. Online gaming was often limited to Starcraft or Warcraft, played over the Local Area Network (LAN). Friends would gather and start battling each other from different computers within a house, with cries of victories reverberating through the walls. It’s possible to be an awful Warcraft player and still design great PCBs. However, if you fail to understand the LAN and its underlying Read Article

Technological Development Made Easy as Pie with Historical Altium Designer

Technological Development Made Easy as Pie with Historical Altium Designer Some words constantly pop-up in daily conversation. Think about how often the word “easy” is used, whether in a bumper sticker that says, “Easy Does It” or a childhood favorite, Easy Bake Ovens. We tell people to “take it easy” and refer to New Orleans as the “Big Easy.” I’m reasonably certain that a guide or book somewhere out there proclaims the “12 Easy Steps to Becoming a Nuclear Scientist.” In a 1940s film called “The Long Voyage Home,” a Read Article

1:51 New Components Panel Watch Video

58 3D Kernel for Design Export and Geometric Calculations Watch Video

24 Multi-Board Object Smart Mates Watch Video

32 Differential Pair Glossing Watch Video

Electronic Component Distributors Harnessing the Power of One-Stop Shopping

Electronic Component Distributors Harnessing the Power of One-Stop Shopping Every year, I spend time working on my house and car to keep them maintained. Trips to the hardware store include adding parts to my stash at home and I try to keep the trips to a minimum so I can enjoy my downtime. There’s nothing worse than chilling to tunes in my garage on a warm summer day only to find that I don’t have a part. Dropping everything to make a run to the hardware store means completely disrupting my afternoon. So managing my Read Article

Layer Management as a Design Tool Priority

Layer Management as a Circuit Board Design Tool Priority Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the same could be said for printed circuit boards. PCBs are similar to cities in that they contain pathways connecting components. Components have dimension into the surrounding air space, as well as into the thickness of the board itself. Hidden subsystems similar to underground wiring and cityscape piping reside within the thickness of the boards. Printed circuit boards mimic cities with their layers of Read Article

Managing 3D models

Managing 3D Electrical MCAD/ECAD Models for Data Transfer Communication is tricky when oppositional semantics fail to play well together. This sentence is a good case in point. When ill stated, information is rarely understood. The same goes with software infrastructures. Many do not play well together when information in one is defined differently in another. 3D models of components for use by mechanical and electrical CAD programs are historically represented quite differently across platforms. This Read Article

Manufacturing and Online Gerber Viewers: Manufacturing with Browser Based Design

Manufacturing and Online Gerber Viewers: Manufacturing with Browser Based Design Watching your design come together in a layout program is hugely satisfying. But when it comes to manufacturing, preparing your designs for fabrication is a different beast. If you don’t have a ton of experience in this area, compiling information that fabricators need to build your device may seem tedious and unnecessary. You might be wondering, “why can’t my manufacturer just look at my CAD files and figure it out themselves?” While they Read Article

Online PCB Printing: What to Know With Small or Large PCB Services

Online PCB Fabrication: What to Know About Small or Large PCB Printing Services If you’re like any designer, you’ve probably spent more time than necessary trying to hammer out all the kinks of your printed circuit board before you go into making your device. But, especially if you’re not particularly part of the industry, you might wonder how exactly the “printed” gets put into the “printed circuit board”. After you’ve spent time learning the particulars of PCB design and laying out your new dream device, it’s time to bring Read Article

Get Better PCB Manufacturing with Clear Instructions from Accurate BOM Data

Build Your Own PCBs With Clear Instructions From Accurate Bom Statistics Data There is an intersection not too far from where I live that causes a lot of confusion. It’s a three-way intersection in the shape of a “T”, and yet only one branch of the “T” has a stop sign on it. I don’t know why it was built this way or why it hasn’t been corrected, but the results are often dangerous. People waiting at the stop sign who aren’t familiar with the intersection tend to assume that the other two branches have stop signs as well Read Article

Altium Bill of Materials: Keep It Simple With ActiveBOM

Altium's Bill of Materials Software: Get Rid of ORCAD's BOM and Keep It Simple With ActiveBOM I don’t know about you, but I have no desire to be a software engineer. I want software that does routine tasks in the background, leaving me to focus on creative activities. Leaving behind rote demands moves my day into dealing with higher-level details like how electricity flows through components. That’s why I’ve ditched ORCAD Bill of Materials software and moved on to Altium’s ActiveBOM–the best Bill of Materials software. Making Bills of Read Article