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Recent Articles
The Importance of Compliance Awareness in Circuit and PCB Design
I had an English professor once who was a lot of fun, but man, his requirements for essay writing were brutal. Making a decent grade required a ton of work. I had to check and recheck my paper’s content to make sure that every detail he asked for was painstakingly covered. These tedious rituals, though annoying and painful, helped teach me how to be thorough with my research. This was something that came in handy when I began my career and had to
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Why PCB Design Auto-Interactive Routing is Not a PCB Autorouter
Editorial credit: Santiparp Wattanaporn / Shutterstock.com A while back I was given the gift of a flight in an AT-6, a WWII era airplane used for training fighter pilots. There couldn’t have been a better gift for an aviation enthusiast, and I spent the next 5 months eagerly anticipating it. Finally, the day arrived and I couldn’t have been happier as we took off into the wild blue yonder. Then the pilot demonstrated an aileron roll, and my Top
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How to Plan Ahead to Meet PCB Disposal Requirements
When I was a kid and learned to solder, I had a mentor that kept an old coffee can on his soldering bench labeled “Lead Waste - DO NOT THROW IN TRASH.” Wire snippings, solder bits, and the random metal detritus that accumulates on a soldering mat all went in there. Apparently, it got full every few years and he took it to a local electronics recycling place to make sure he wasn’t adding any lead or heavy metals to the environment. I was shocked
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Designing a PCB for High voltage: PCB Layers
My sister used to decorate cakes as a 4-H project, while I showed chickens and built a computer. She had to create at least six “show quality” cakes a year, plus all the versions that didn’t come out perfect. It turns out you can actually get tired of eating cake, so eventually you just get styrofoam forms and decorate those. It gives you a chance to practice the design before you actually put it on a real cake. Getting the design right might
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The Best PCB Design Software Tools and How They Work
Using the right tools can save you lots of time, money, and frustration no matter what type of design you intend to realize. The old adage “work smarter, not harder” definitely applies to printed board design. Great PCB design software will provide the tools you need to work intelligently, instead of frustrating you with awkward features. Your choice of EDA software is subjective to your design needs. Most of the time it comes down to having the
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Manual Routing vs Using an Automated Router: Why Auto-Interactive Routing Is the Ideal PCB Design Solution
I have been designing printed boards for a long time. Like most experienced PCB designers, I have my reservations about autorouters. Autorouters have a reputation for being difficult to set up and run, taking a long time to work, and giving questionable results. Often you would put your board into the router in the evening only to find the next morning that the results were not worth saving. I knew designers who would spend hours and hours
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How PCB BOM Management Tools Facilitate Efficient Communication Between Departments
Many years ago, I was a junior PCB learning the ropes of the trade in a large company. To help me understand the entire product production process, my boss took me on a tour of the manufacturing floor. The people that I met there were not rude per say, but I noticed a subtle attitude of, “Oh, you’re one of them” that puzzled me. The reason for their annoyance I found out later was that they would routinely suffer delays because of bad information
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Bill of Materials in Supply Chain Management: Part Inventory Control
Sending information to other departments and personnel is a regular part of the PCB design process. For purchasing, their part of this process starts when engineering sends them a bill of materials () for a new design. At this point in the design cycle, the is a preliminary document and it is constantly changing as are added, updated, or eliminated during the design cycle. The problem for purchasing is that this constantly changing data impacts
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High Speed PCB Design Considerations: Component Shapes Considerations
When starting a high speed PCB design, there’s a lot that must be considered before the design ever gets into layout. Schematic organization, board materials & layer configuration, critical component placement, and how high speed signals are to be routed are all aspects of high speed design that need to be planned for. Often there is one area that doesn’t get as much consideration as everything else, and that is the component footprint shapes
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PCB BOM Management: Spend Less Time on Your BOM and Reduce Delays in Manufacturing
Real-time solutions with management tools Cafeterias in colleges, summer camps, and schools are often known for serving up food that has a consistent quality and similar ingredients. For the kids who are tired of eating spaghetti with meatballs, this approach to food production is a downer. However, from a manufacturing point of view, using standard ingredients with minimal variety makes for efficient production. This is also true in circuit
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Introduction to High Speed PCB Designing: Is FR-4 the Best High Speed Material Choice for High Speed PCB Design?
We’ve all been there at one time or another when we’re tasked with a project that lies outside our comfort zone. For me, that day came when my boss asked me to design a high speed board. While I considered myself to be a somewhat experienced PCB designer, I knew that high speed PCB design has many restrictions that you do not normally encounter when you’re designing an average circuit. Initially I invested time into making my schematics
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PCB Circuit Design Tips: Standard vs. Specialized Component Selection in PCB Design
As a kid, I was fascinated by hovercrafts. These nearly frictionless vehicles go from land to water without pause and spin 360s on demand like a carnival ride. I knew that the cost of a full-scale build would require mowing every yard in the county, so instead, I started by constructing a homemade radio-controlled model. It worked beautifully on ponds and flat parking lots, but in our hilly corner of the woods, the sleek craft required all of the
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Multilayer PCB Design: Manufacturing Boards for High Voltage PCBs
One of my favorite movies is the original Shrek. It was thrown into the nerd vernacular of my friends and siblings, along with more traditional sources of quotes, like Star Wars. One scene particularly stands out, when Shrek explains to Donkey that ogres, like himself, are complex creatures. “Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers.” Donkey points out that not everyone likes onions, but everyone
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PCB BOM Management Tools and Real Time Part Access: How It Will Help Your Design for Manufacturability
Have you ever been so ready to take off on a new project that you can’t wait to jump into it? Of course you have. As engineers that’s part of what makes us tick. We’ve got so many ideas running around in our head that we would rather forego sleep or food in order to create a design. Then it happens, some kind of delay forces us to lock up the brakes on our creative process. There are many scenarios that can do this, but one of the worst is when
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Circuit Board Design and BOM Management in Low Volume PCB Assembly
What’s the difference between Angry Birds and SpongeBob? I’m probably at an age where I shouldn’t be caring about these things, but choosing the wrong character for my son’s 5th birthday cake could spell disaster. As a designer, you probably can’t relate to my need to carefully consider the repercussions of choosing SpongeBob. However, you might understand it better knowing that I apply the same level of caution when designing for low volume
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PCB Layout Constraints That Help Manage Component Obsolescence
Just about everyone in the world of engineering has heard some variation of the “Iron Triangle” theory. It’s a popular way to talk about what is or isn’t possible among those given the task of getting things done. Basically, it is a philosophy that says you can get something done fast, cheap, or good; pick two. For example, when designing a PCB for an aircraft, cheap goes out the window, fast takes a back seat and quality is paramount
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BOM Automation: The Benefits of Having an Automated Bill of Materials in Project Management
I have some friends who founded a startup company to create and market a brilliant new product. Their product quickly became a success, but all their hard work was constantly undermined by communication issues between departments. It wasn’t long until the engineers found their creative hands tied, purchasing was buried under an avalanche of unreliable documentation, and the product build-in manufacturing was slowed to a crawl from incorrect and
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