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Recent Articles
Electronic Parts Sourcing with Integrated Component Libraries
The weekend is grocery time at our house, and we always make a thorough list of everything we need for the next two weeks and where we will be buying it. You may not be as meticulous as my wife and I when it comes to buying groceries, but it pays to be thorough when you need to build a bill of materials for your PCB. Once you’ve got your design complete, you need to ask yourself: where am I going to get all of these components I just placed in my
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Identify Vendor Parts Early: Manage BoMs Proactively With Consolidated Part Sourcing
Walking a tightrope requires intricate balance. Simply visualized as a walker and a rope in space. Simple moves into complexity when the walker’s senses are skewed to balance. Careful placement of each foot pulls from neurological pathways communicating intricate information simultaneously. Should information fail to arrive when the foot is moving may push the walker off the rope. Managing Bills of Material from early circuit concept through
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What is Lenz's Law or Simulation and How Does it Affect PCB Design?
Lenz's law is one of the fundamental physical laws that describes the multitude of relationships between electricity and magnetism. Together with Ampere's law, Gauss law, Faraday's law, Coulomb's law, and the Lorentz force law, we have everything we need to understand the classical behavior of the electromagnetic field. Among these laws, Lenz's law and Faraday's law work together to describe how the magnetic field in your PCB is related to the
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What to do With Unused Pins on a Microcontroller
I must admit that I’m not exactly the right person to turn to for cleaning tips. I dread the annual spring cleaning as there are always surprises in the storerooms to deal with. Occasionally, I stumble upon items that I barely even recognize but eventually decide to hold on to. While my indecisiveness with unused items results in some nagging from my wife and loss of additional space, failing to deal with unused pins on a microcontroller can have
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A Complete Bill of Materials and Other Suggestions for Error Free PCB Manufacturing
Long before my youngest son became a teenager, we already knew that in everything that he did he worked at turning the situation around to best benefit himself. At one point he was doing something that he shouldn’t be doing, and I told him that if he continued down that path that I would ground him. Instead of backing off as I expected, he instead had a contemplative look on his face as he asked me; “for how long would I be grounded?” I couldn’t
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Don't Undervalue Ease of User Interface
You know how cooking can get complicated when you aren’t in your own kitchen? Since they aren’t “right where you left them”, you have to hunt for a pan or utensil that will work for what you are doing. It takes more time and possibly burning some eggs while you are looking for a spatula. And that’s just cooking something simple for breakfast; imagine trying to prepare a complicated meal. Situations like this are what help the restaurant business
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Count the Cost With Rigid Flexible PCB Cost Comparison
When my oldest boy bought his first car I was worried that he might have made a mistake. Sadly my worries turned out to be true and he was stuck with a lemon. I believe that his exact words were; “It seemed like such a good deal at the time”. He thought that paying less money for an older car would be a benefit, and of course, his actual experience was the exact opposite. The old expression of “count the cost” before you buy applies to everything
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Altium Vault Streamlines Product Development Process With Early Access to Component Sourcing and Costing Instead of Placeholders
The product development process for printed circuit assemblies is highly dependent on complete Bills of Material. Complete Bills of Material list the PCB along with all components soldered or adhered onto the board to make the assembly. Components are unavailable early in the product development cycle because EDA libraries are antiquated and lack current parts information when circuit designers are drawing schematics. To stay on the development’s
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Find Replacement Electronic Components With an Integrated Library
Much as we would like, designing a new product or system is not without its hiccups. Designs, functionality, and component changes may be made at the last minute, forcing design modification or component replacement. Replacement circuit components or replacement can require thorough knowledge of your circuit boards. Repairing a circuit board is often more than finding a circuit breaking. Electrical equipment and service panel tinkering can go so
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PCB Manufacturing: Access Databases vs. Integrated Design Software For Bills of Materials
Building databases in programs like Access is easy enough. Access databases deserve a lot of credit for helping organize tons of information in one place. But adapting these programs to electronics design can be a real challenge. Any PCB that is intended for manufacturing must have a corresponding bill of materials. This document is critical as it lists all of information about your PCB in a standardized format. Your bill of materials contains a
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Why Constantly Updating Component Libraries are Boons
If you’re my age or older, you might remember looking through the card catalog at your local library. Lacking any digitized system, thumbing through a list of information on paper was the only way to find the book you were looking for. This might be fine for finding books in a hurry, but it is a terrible system for locating the components you need for your PCB. Within the potential production environments, PCB layout is only one piece of an ever
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HDI PCB Designs and the CAD Tools Behind Them
Although it is said that the only guarantees in life are death and taxes, I would submit that the third guarantee in life is that electronic devices will continue to get smaller and smaller. I’m pretty sure that no one wants their cell phone to grow back to the size of a brick again, so to continue this path of ever decreasing sized electronics means that circuit boards need to shrink in size as well. The best way to do this is to use high
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Don’t Let Your Unrouted Nets be Traces to Nowhere
Have you ever seen one of those movies where a train is barreling down the track and starts to cross a bridge only to realize further down the line that the tracks run out and the bridge goes nowhere? That is a scary situation and only an alert train driver, formerly known as a train engineer, can prevent a catastrophe. Although, not as catastrophic, having unrouted nets on your board can wreak havoc to your PCB’s operation. Unrouted nets are
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Eliminate the Crosstalk: LVDS Routing and the Art of Differential Signaling
During a typical baseball game, coaches use the silent language of hand signals to instruct batters and baserunners while catchers use similar signs to recommend pitches to pitchers. Players in the outfield and the infield use hand signals to find the right locations when anticipating the skills of a batter. Electronics has its own version of a silent language with the variety of signals exchanged almost instantaneously within a circuit. Single
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Design Synchronization Tools: Worry Less About Schematic and Layout De-Sync
Drawing out your next great idea on the back of an envelope is much easier than drawing out a PCB by hand. This is where PCB software becomes important and is used to take your design all the way to production. Your schematic and layout need keep your design data synchronized throughout the design entire process. Keeping all your design data synchronized across your design tools is critical to maintaining high productivity. Your design software
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Mitigating High Junction Temperature to Optimize PCB Performance
I consider myself a great multitasker, especially when it comes to preparing meals for my son. I’ll have fish frying in one pan, soup boiling in the other, and potatoes in the oven. Things usually go as well as planned except on rare occasions when one of the dishes burns while I’m absorbed in other tasks. Fortunately, these temperature problems won’t cost me much more than a few dollars and some time. In electronics, your hardware can literally
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Mechanical System Verification Keeps Production Optimized
These days, electronic packaging is more than just a neat rectangular box with some holes drilled for input and output cables. Electronics are sleeker with uniquely-shaped packaging, and your android mobile phone circuit board diagram images need to fit into tight clearances. Whether it is through design optimization with collaboration between design engineers and mechanical engineering, or through a production process with strong inventory
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