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Recent Articles
What You Need to Know About Choosing Embedded Modems for IoT
IoT enables you to control devices over the internet. If you grew up in an era where the Internet existed without Google, you may be as amazed as I am to see how far technology has evolved. It would have been beyond my wildest imagination to think about machines conversing intelligently on the Internet without much human intervention. Back when I was introduced to the online world, it took several minutes to simply load a single page of sports
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AutoRouter and Massive Potential for Routing Ease
I once owned a little pop-up tent trailer, and hooking it up to my car was a very involved process. My wife would use a combination of hand signals and shouted instructions to guide me in as I moved the car back and forth in order to position the hitch perfectly under the trailer coupler. One day my father in-law-was helping me and I started my lengthy explanation to him of the hitching process. Without saying a word he simply reached down
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What is Carry Propagation Delay in High Speed Data Processing?
I sometimes get into text message conversations with friends that go completely haywire. It’s too easy to ask five questions back and forth in a single text, and trying to respond to everything causes our message chain to go completely out of sync. It isn’t until three text messages later that I actually respond to everything my friend asked, and by then we’ve moved on to a completely new topic. Signal delay between logic circuits in a PCB or an
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Comparing Electronic Prices with Supply Chain Visibility
Thankfully, I’m no longer a broke college student that has ramen every other day for dinner. But the spending and budgeting habits I developed during that period of my life have stuck with me and served me well into adulthood. I’m not eating ramen anymore, but I still keep an eye on my monthly budget. If you’re considering which components to include in your next PCB and are trying to formulate a production budget, you’ll need access to supply
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Impedance and PCB Etching: Utilizing Altium Designer for Your Board Needs
Today’s high-speed PCB designs require that the design engineer take charge of how the circuit board will be built. There was a time where PCB construction specifics were handled by manufacturing engineers in another department, or even in another company. How the board was built up didn’t have an important effect on the signal performance, and the purpose of the design team was to simply create electrical circuitry that performed the function
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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
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Creative Design with Buried Vias in Your Next HDI PCB
Once I learned how to use different types of vias on my PCBs, I found that my routing strategies greatly improved, and I was able to reduce my overall board size. Judicious use of the right vias lets you place connections only between the layers you absolutely need for your board to function, instead of making connections that aren’t necessary. As newer devices pack more functionality (and more components) onto a single board, vias are
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Optimizing Electronic Product Documentation for Assembly and Manufacturing
I’m the kind of person that can get overwhelmed with too much information. If my wife gives me a choice of restaurants to pick from when we go out to dinner, it feels like my head might explode. Burgers, pizza, tacos, chicken, deli sandwich, family-style, Lo Mein, seafood, steaks… my usual response is to look at her and say; “what were my choices again?” She has learned over the years to instead say; “I’m hungry, do you want a burger or some Lo
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Utilizing Layout Options for Rigid-Flex Design
If you own an electronic device that folds, bends, twists, or deforms in some way, it most likely contains a rigid-flex PCB. These circuits contain many of the elements in any PCB, like traces, vias, and even components mounted on a flexible ribbon. However, getting started with a comprehensive design for these circuits requires the right software specifically built for rigid-flex boards. Form factors are becoming more specialized and demanding
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Weekly Digest: Printed Electronics and PCB Design
We’ve collected everything published this week to bring our readers resources to read, watch and listen to all in one place. This week we’ve explored Printed Electronics on the podcast by discussing materials and modern applications of the technology. We’d like to take an opportunity to share a few other recent resources on the topic: Printed Electronics Whiteboard Video with David Marrachki How to Design Printed Electronics in Altium Designer 19
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How to Find Equivalent ICs in Your PCB
When I was younger, I would routinely open up old or broken electronics just to see how they worked. I didn’t start to understand how they worked until I was older, but I always marvelled at the mass of components and the complexity with which they were laid out on a circuit board. I would even have fun connecting from different devices in the hopes that I could resurrect a broken device. ICs in your PCB have a number of specifications that must
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PCB Manufacturing Tolerances: Adding Fabrication Tolerance Options to Your Manufacturer Deliverables
Much as we would like, no manufacturing process is perfect. Every process produces slight errors in part sizes or placement, and PCBs are no different. Since some PCB applications have very tight tolerances, you’ll need to specify your tolerance requirements for your manufacturer. Let alone maintaining secure understandings of solder mask and solder placement, material thickness specifications, or any surface mount components - designating your
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How Integrated PCB Design Software Helps you Manage Documentation and Outputs
If you’re like me, then you’re a hardware fanatic. You’re the type that enjoys creating and watching your ideas come to life before your eyes. The last thing you want to do is sit behind a desk and create change orders, bills of materials, and assembly plans for your new product. What if there was a way to cut down the time required to generate these important documents? With deliverables and documentation requiring standardized formats and
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SMART System for Data Management
I have seen it, and perhaps you have too, where excessive design problems and too many re-spins of a PCB design can be attributed to just one thing; improper data management. I worked with a company once that considered half a dozen board spins acceptable just to iron out all the library problems. These kinds of problems can be greatly reduced and even eliminated with careful data management. The SMART system spells out a data management process
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What is SRAM? PCB Design Tips and How to Prevent Data Loss
SRAM loses its data when power is removed. One of the best inventions in editing software is the autosave feature, which prevents Murphy’s Law from striking at the worst time. Decades ago, I nearly cried when several pages of an important university assignment were literally wiped out, as the non-existence of the autosave feature was made worse by my reluctance to hit the ‘Save’ button. In electronics, you risk losing the entire data stored in a
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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
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Take Charge of Your PCB Design with This Bill of Material Software Free Trial
New Year’s resolutions are often the focus of humor as people admit that they are difficult to keep. The old joke is; “last year I resolved to lose 15 pounds, only 20 more to go.” The important thing about resolutions though is that they show that you are taking charge of something in your life. Diet, exercise, learning, or whatever, the point is that you have seen something that needs to change and you are committing yourself to make it happen
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