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OnTrack Newsletter: Altium Designer 20 Sneak Peek, Impedance Measurement, Food for Thought - November 2019 OnTrack Newsletter: Altium Designer 20 Sneak Peek, Impedance Measurement, Food for Thought - November 2019 OnTrack Newsletter Nov. 2019 Vol. 3 No. 6 A First Look Inside Altium Designer 20 November marks the launch of Altium Designer 20, and we thought you’d be like to hear from a couple of Altium veteran “insiders” about what you can expect to see in this latest release. Lawrence Romine, VP of Corporate Marketing and Ben Jordan, Technical Marketing Director, Corporate (both engineers) share what their favorite new features are and which ones they Read Article
Follow Your Multilayer Ground Return Path to Prevent EMI Follow Your Multilayer Ground Return Path to Prevent EMI Following the path back to ground can quickly become complex in a complicated multilayer PCB. When your PCB has a small layer count (e.g., a 4-layer board with two plane layers), it becomes rather easy to determine the return path and deliberately design it to prevent EMI. The situation becomes more complicated when you’re working with higher layer counts. Multiple plane layers and conductors can form the ground return path, even if the conductor Read Article
Driving Small DC Motors With Altium Designer Driving Small DC Motors With Altium Designer In this article, we’re going to run through the actual implementation of a driver IC from schematic creation to PCB layout. You will find this project on GitHub, released under an open-source license if you simply want to grab it to copy and paste into your own design. Part Selection I have two small, high-speed motors that I want to drive, which will draw about 1 amp each under load, and I’ll need to run off a 30 volt power source in an Read Article
multiple stacks of papers representing multiboard system BOM challenges Problems in Multiboard BOM Generation? Unified Design Tools Can Help Your next multiboard system design is likely complicated enough. You’ve got to worry about multiple layouts, multiple schematics, signal integrity within and between boards, mechanical form and function, and EMI/EMC. With all these design aspects to worry about, documenting every aspect of your board can be a time suck. With so many new products being built from multiboard systems, you shouldn’t have to choose between multiboard system designer Read Article
Signal Distortion in Your PCB: Sources and Solutions Signal Distortion in Your PCB: Sources and Solutions Length matching for high-speed signals is all about synchronization... Signal distortion often gets a passing mention in many discussions on signal integrity and circuit analysis. As more networking products start running at higher speeds and use complicated modulation schemes, you’ll find that signal distortion becomes a serious problem that contributes to bit error rates. Distortion sources are cited as one of the primary bottlenecks preventing Read Article
Electronics System-Level Design in Altium Designer Electronics System-Level Circuit Engineering Design in Altium Designer Electronics system level design lets you focus on functionality and abstraction The day-to-day life of a PCB layout engineer is all about translating schematics into a real, manufacturable PCB. Before this can happen, designs begin at an abstract level that focuses on designing functionality. As the overall design process progresses, design requirements are made more granular, reaching the signal processing level and, eventually, the component Read Article
How to Create an Amplifier Simulation in Altium Designer How to Create an Amplifier Simulation in Altium Designer There are a variety of performance simulations you can run in Altium Designer. Read and understand the role of simulation and learn how to create and run an amplifier simulation in your schematic. Read Article
How to Choose an RGB LED Panel for Your Next Upverter Project How to Choose an RGB LED Screen Panel for Your Next Upverter Project Billboards are just one application for RGB LED panels I remember the days where I would drive down the highway and see workers placing new graphics on billboards dotting the roadside. Now you hardly see this because so many billboards have gone digital. You can thank RGB LED panel display tiles for this, which allows multiple advertisements to share the same space and allows for some interesting animated advertisements. RGB LED panel displays Read Article
How to Add an RGB Matrix Display to Your Board in Upverter How to Add an RGB Matrix Display to Your Board in Upverter Micro RGB Matrix Tile connected to the WiFi RGB LED Matrix board. When it comes to custom display applications, you may not need to go the route of including a large-scale LED or LCD display screen. For specialized or artistic lighting applications, you can benefit from a system that provides selectable color mixing and distribution across your lighting module. This is where an RGB matrix display is an ideal choice for your next lighting Read Article
Calculating your PCB Complexity & First Pass Yields Calculating your PCB Complexity & First Pass Yields There are four things I know about PCB yields—mathematically! PCB yields are not normally distributed. They are what is called GAMMA Distributed. Defects that produce low yields may be systemic and repeatable, others may be just random—but you can test for this. You can predict yields if you take the time to collect the data. Yields are such wonderful things! I wonder why we don’t write about them more. They are the dividing phenomena that often Read Article
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