ECAD/MCAD

Browse our library of resources to learn more about electronic computer aided design (ECAD) and mechanical computer aided design (MCAD) for printed circuit boards.

SPI Versus I2C: How to Choose the Best Protocol for Your Memory Chips I was going shoe-hunting the other day and realized exactly why I don’t buy shoes all that often: all of the parameters. I was looking for sneakers specifically so there were metrics for comfort, bounciness, durability, wet-resistance, weight, toe-size, arch-support, and more. Sometimes it feels like you need to have a graduate degree just to find the right shoe for your foot. That’s what I call an overburden of information. You will deal with a Read Article

Best PCB Routing Practices after Auto Routing Goes the Distance My wife just got one of those new programmable electric pressure cookers, and she has been creating all kinds of wonderful meals with it. She instinctively knows how to get the most out of the tools and ingredients in our kitchen, while I, on the other hand, tend to create meals that feature either burnt or undercooked foods. What we’ve discovered is that the pressure cooker is not the one-button-magically-cooks-everything answer to your kitchen Read Article

A Big Kick in PCB Interconnect Solutions: Multi-Board Best Practices I’ve always enjoyed thinking about circuits similar to tiny cities. Copper routing as the streets, components as building structures, vias, and the following electrons as the inhabitants running around. But imagine what PCB would be in the city from Inception where the flat ground starts turning on its head and extending overtop, or if Salvador Dali became a city-planner. In today’s world of densely packed components (HDI), advanced manufacturing Read Article

Sooner or Later, Your PCB Design Layout Will Need Rework I woke up last Saturday morning eager to get started on my latest backyard project. First, a trip to the hardware store for supplies, and then spend the rest of the day working on the project. Or at least I thought that I had it all planned out until my wife reminded me that I had promised to help her with some other chores. The proverbial rug of my weekend project was yanked out from under me by the classic “honey-do” block. Since I had, in fact Read Article

Circuit Board Sizes and Shapes, How to Make a PCB For many years my career took me to a lot of different locations as I traveled to conduct business. One of the wonderful things about travel is how it opens you up to new experiences and individuals. You only truly begin understanding how diverse our world is after witnessing the differences throughout various of it. I just wish I brought a dog with me on those trips, so I could name it “Toto,” because I sure wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Just as Read Article

The Best PCB Design Tools Help You Grow From Design Kindergarten I used to work with middle-school aged kids, and one of the topics that I taught them was how to work together. I would separate them into four small groups and give each group a set of instructions on how to complete a section of a project. The intent was that after the four individual sections were completed, the kids would then come back together and use those sections to form one final project. The results though were usually pretty funny as Read Article

Putting Constraints to Work for You in Your Circuit Routing Software When I was a kid, my parents had a 1955 Oldsmobile Super 88 Holiday. What a great car. As an eight year old though, the main thing that stood out to me was that it had a decorative rope that stretched horizontally across the back of the front seat. Sitting in the back with my brother one day, we informed our parents that with the fancy rope in place we no longer needed to use our seat belts. I saw my dad wink to my mom, and then at a very slow Read Article

Through It All: PCB Tools and What Experience Has Shown I have always been aware that places exist in the world where the January gray skies and chills never happen, but I’m still not entirely sure where they are. Whether it’s picking up a new hobby, being invigorated by your resolutions, or rewatching some of your favorite movies under a heavy, comfortable blanket, January has a lot more to offer than the cold, wet, and gloomy weather that is on the other side of most of our windows. As the doorstep Read Article

Manage Embedded Software through Design Rules for a No-Line PCB Design Recently, Amazon opened its first grocery market where one of its main points was its refusal of lines. Of course, its first-day publicity was a line of people outside waiting to try it out. I’m sure that as the newness diminishes it will be able to fulfill its promise of no lines; however, for now, I am mostly hoping that the store still had some rules in place in-case there was a line. After all, if one of your basic premises is to avoid lines Read Article

Help Your PCB Design Process with CAD Tools that are Designed to Work Together I’ve never quite understood how in all of our technological developments as humans, we haven’t yet developed a better grounding for playgrounds. When I was still small enough to swing, instead of sinking the whole swingset, I remember being so frustrated that our playground had rocks and mulch for us to run around on. That has always seemed a bit counterintuitive to me; designate an area as a play area for children but line it with hard or Read Article

The Difference Between Breadboard Projects and Prototype Layouts I was just making myself some lunch and cutting up some fixin’s for a sandwich when it occurred to me that I was using a breadboard. Although I’ve always thought of it as a cutting board, it is actually what my grandmother would have called a breadboard; a flat piece of wood for slicing bread. For those of us in the electronics world, a “breadboard” is something very different. So, I decided to look it up. I was surprised to learn that in the Read Article

Keep Your PCB Assembly and Production Processes Like Your Best Pants: Seamless I lost a button on an old pair of jeans the other day and I was totally unable to repair it. The seams were all sorts of wonky, and while normally you can find extra buttons along the waist there were none to be found. My mom taught me to always check the seams, but sometimes it’s easy to get lazy and forget to do some of the most basic procedures when you want to get an otherwise grueling experience done with. Some brands are more trustworthy Read Article

Learning Current Density: Don’t Pop the Balloon One area of PCB design that probably does not get the attention that it deserves is current density. Current density in a PCB trace is much like the pressure in a balloon. You want to squeeze as much air into the balloon as you can, but if you put too much: boom! The same is true of PCB traces many times. We want the traces to be as small as possible yet carry the most current possible, and if the trace carries too much: boom! For PCBs, that boom Read Article

Security by Design: Internet of Things Authentification and Self Testing Have you noticed how many organizations are getting hacked lately? Businesses like Equifax aren’t the only targets of these attacks; government institutions like the NSA have also been hit. Even the Internet of Things (IoT) has been targeted. Hackers infect and control devices in order to use them as a tool for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults. I’m sure you’ve gotten your credit card hacked, as well; I have. The difficult part about Read Article

Internet of Things Security Issues Prompt Government Intervention When you look at an Internet of Things (IoT) device like a fork or a juicer, what do you see? Like me, you probably see a gadget that was designed for a particular purpose. Less upstanding citizens may see a digital weapon instead of an innocuous gizmo. In the past several years, there have been several high-profile distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that were enabled by poorly-secured IoT devices. Hackers infiltrate light bulbs and Read Article

How to Create a 3D Donut and Other Unusual Shapes in Your PCB Design It is generally very simple to create realistic 3D mechanical shapes in Altium Designer® using the included Extruded, Cylinder, and Sphere shape types in the PCB Library editor. However, some shapes can be tricky. A board outline can be extremely helpful and can even produce shapes like the polygon (polygon pour). A 3D donut, however, is what we will be focusing on today. Although a hole cannot be cut out of any of the Altium-created shapes, a Read Article

How Online BOM Management Helps Build Teamwork Last week one of my co-workers, a brilliant guy named Phil, quit his job for a position in another company. Phil was amazing, and losing him was a tremendous blow to our department and the company. The tragic thing though is that Phil didn’t leave for a better job, he left because he felt that he no longer added any value. It is amazing at how many truly exemplary employees end up quitting because of workplace frustrations and feeling Read Article