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Recent Articles
How PCB Library Organization Expands Design Capabilities
A popular children’s cartoon featured a superhero called the “Masked Retriever” who had a real job as an ordinary librarian. In the pursuit of justice, the Masked Retriever left a bold checkmark as a calling card and pursued anyone with an overdue book. In one animated adventure, the Masked Retriever pursued the most powerful man in the region by horseback because he wouldn’t give up his book. Unlike the of the Masked Retriever, PCB libraries don
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IoT Medical Product and Application Design: Challenges and Considerations
Ideally, any technology is going to drastically affect people and the ability of people to accomplish whatever tasks they need. Yet, when new technology is entering the medical domain, the stakes are always a bit higher: one has to be cognizant that any faults, errors, or malfunctions are going to immediately affect someone’s health. Granted, not every medical device is going to be life-or-death, but they should still be considered carefully
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Constraint Driven Design versus Rules Driven Design in a Unified Environment
Wouldn’t it be great if more rules in life were checked automatically? I love to cook Italian food, but it gets tiring going back and forth between a cookbook and a pot of tomato sauce. The only automatic rules checking mechanism in the kitchen is your oven timer. Fortunately for PCB designers, high-quality software packages include constraint and rules checking features that can check your layout and schematic automatically. The ability to set
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PCB Design Software: Creating a Bill of Material using Altium Designer
You’ve done it, your printed circuit board is finished and ready for PCB assembly. The schematic is finalized, the layout is checked and approved and you are ready to get this thing built. To do that though, you need to create a bill of materials. Fortunately, we are long past the days where these documents were created by hand. Every CAD system out there will automatically create a bill of materials through some library or other process. But
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Role of the Embedded PCB Capacitor in Circuit Board Design
Mention capacitance, conductors, and dielectric capacitors in PCB to a 7th-grade science class, and you may see glazed-over expressions and hear bored sighs. I mean, hey, sometimes I get this with adults and coworkers I’m talking to so I can’t say I’m unsympathetic to the kids, but I have to promise them that circuits and circuit boards are, truly, fascinating. Let's help them answer the question: why are capacitors used in circuit boards? To
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PCB Via Aspect Ratio: Design, Signal Integrity, and Manufacturability
There is a certain beauty that exists in nature and can only be mimicked in PCB design. The golden ratio found in nature is a good example of a universal relationship that defines the aspect ratio of plants and animals. As with anything, PCBs can have layers to them: conductive layering, dielectric layers, barrier layers and with layers come drilling. And while PCB via aspect ratios are no golden ratio, they have a beauty all their own and are
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Design Planning with Differential Pair Routing Software and Directive Symbols
If the components on your PCB are like the organs in your body, then your trace routing between components are like blood vessels. What looks like a complex tangle of copper connections is actually a meticulously designed system that uses well-understood design rules. Your PCB design software can help you maximize your productivity while routing and prevent errors using directive designations. Great PCB design software doesn’t just let you set
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CAD Layout Software for Modern PCB Design and Modern PCB Designers
Back in the day, PCB designers drew schematics by hand. Instead of guiding a mouse, technicians used red and blue pencils to carefully draw pads and traces on vellum parchment paper. Their tools included a triangle, a T-square, and templates. Forget a thorough design process involving CAD tools, full team collaboration, differentiated schematic diagrams and circuit board designs - one was lucky enough to have a steady hand. After completing a
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Auto-Interactive Routing to Overcome Obstacles and Other Polygons
There’s no doubt about it, routing traces on a printed circuit board by hand can be a lot of fun. It’s an engaging challenge to make the routing as neat, tight, and correct as possible to give you the shortest routes with the best signal integrity. Once you are done you can take a lot of pride in knowing that your measured lines are perfect, you differential pairs are spot on, and everything looks great. The only problem is that level of manual
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Dispel Confusion with Global Editing: Poor DxDesigner Usability Causes Confusion
The world has turned the corner from linear to organic. The need for global editing within versatile environments continues to grow. It used to be I could keep one file in my office drawer to collect bills for the month. When I got paid, it was a simple matter to list the bills, add them up, and write the checks. These days, bill paying goes much quicker on the computer. But I’ve had to adapt to different steps on each utility website and
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Analog Meets Digital: How Converters Can Make or Break Signal Performance
We are born into a world of purely analog signals. The sound of a stream running through a mountain meadow, the brown color of dirt, that screaming baby next to you; all of these ‘signals’ are of an analog nature. Yet, we grow up and seem to spend most of our time attempting to turn these signals into a reproducible ‘digital’ copy so we can perceive them through a digital device. Analog and digital signal performance is necessary to keep in mind
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What Are the Advantages of Using Templates for PCB Design?
The domestication of horses, inventing the wheel and developing the combustion engine are tremendous milestones that we laud for enabling us to get around more efficiently and explore new places. Although, this is true another creation that deserves at least as much credit for giving most of us the confidence to branch out from our familiar surroundings is the map. The knowledge that someone before us has traversed a path gives us confidence in
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PCB Component Data Management Resolved with Connected Component Applications
My mouth was watering as I picked up the box sitting on my front porch. Dinner would be ready in 20 minutes. I was so hungry, having just gotten home. The box contained recipe cards and ingredients for making dinners throughout the week. I put on my slippers, and I pulled a recipe card from the box. All the ingredients were there. This new meal delivery service was growing on me. I’d be eating dinner soon, with time to spare for needed downtime
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Avoid Integrated and Netlist Data Flows Slowing Design Starts
The chaos theory was used by Edward Lorenz early in the 1960s to model weather. Given multiple data points and nonlinear behavior, integrated circuit and synthesized netlist data starts because of nonlinear behavior. Just like the weather which is difficult to model and predict. It turns out nonlinear complexity produces beautiful, elegant pictures of real things. A tree is fractal; if you were to magnify its branch 1 million times, you’d see the
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Journey Through Embedded Active Components in PCB Substrates with Pacemakers
With 200,000 pacemakers implanted in the United States per year, the surgical process to correct heart abnormalities has become routine. When preparing for the process, cardiologists choose from three different incision types to determine the best implant method. Each type of incision impacts patient comfort and the amount of risk involved with the surgery. The incision provides access to a vein and allocates space for the pacemaker. A
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Now that They’re Assigned, Find and Report Testpoints in Your PCB Design
Whether it is a test in school, a driver’s test, or some sort of casual mention of a test at work, the word “test” can cause normally calm people to have a sense of anxiety. On the other hand, once beyond the test you can see those same people visibly relax. Perhaps that is why when PCB designers finish assigning testpoints to their design it is easy for them to breathe a huge sigh of relief. But, once you’ve assigned those testpoints there’s
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Scaling, Not Sinking Your Electronics: BOM Management Advice
The most stressful part of owning a boat was when it came time to launch or recover it from the river. The boat was large and together with the trailer and truck, there was a lot of equipment to maneuver up and down the ramp without making any mistakes. If some kind of problem came up I would end up with the boat, the truck, or me sinking into the water. That sense of anxiety was very similar to the feelings I’ve experienced working with
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