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How Autorouters Help Expedite Design How Autorouters Help Expedite Traces Design Routing traces around on your PCB is like knitting a quilt. Not only can it take forever, but it requires very precise steps to ensure that all your stitches fit together seemlessly. If you get your stitches wrong, then everything can fall apart. Just like we have automatic threading sewing machines that increase productivity, autorouters can do the same for your PCB. But be wary: not all autorouters have the same capabilities. The best PCB Read Article
Electronic Component Distributors Harnessing the Power of One-Stop Shopping Electronic Component Distributors Harnessing the Power of One-Stop Shopping Every year, I spend time working on my house and car to keep them maintained. Trips to the hardware store include adding parts to my stash at home and I try to keep the trips to a minimum so I can enjoy my downtime. There’s nothing worse than chilling to tunes in my garage on a warm summer day only to find that I don’t have a part. Dropping everything to make a run to the hardware store means completely disrupting my afternoon. So managing my Read Article
Win at Power Delivery System Design Win at Power Delivery System Design This article is intended to define the new challenges and provide guidance in how to successfully engineer the Power Delivery System (PDS) so it meets the needs of new technologies. As integrated circuit technology has made it possible to put billions of transistors on a single IC it has resulted in very powerful systems on a chip. This has made it possible to put the equivalent of supercomputers inside video games, cell phones and a host of Read Article
Differential pairs Confused About Differential Signaling or Clocks? Check out this quick snippet of the Altium Podcast with guru of high speed design Lee Ritchey The primary reason that differential signaling is dominating the digital world is that far higher data bandwidths can be achieved over a pair of wires than with parallel, single-ended signaling protocols. The Internet as we know it would not be possible without differential signaling. This information is intended to clear up any confusion about Read Article
Everything You Need for Successful PCB Stackup Design There are three demands placed on stackup design: controlled impedance, crosstalk control and the need for interplane capacitance. Some fabricators could get the impedance right in a stackup, but there is no way for them to account for the other two. This responsibility rests with the design engineer who is the only one who knows what is needed and how to implement the needed control. This information is intended to provide guidance on the Read Article
Noise Transfer is Annoying, Learn How to Contain Crosstalk Noise Transfer is Annoying in PCBs, Learn How to Contain Crosstalk from expert Lee Ritchey The words crosstalk and coupling are used to describe the injection of electromagnetic energy from one transmission line to another running nearby. In printed circuit boards crosstalk is usually two traces running side by side in the same layer or one over the top of the other in adjacent layers. This coupled energy appears as noise on the victim trace and can cause malfunctions if the amplitude is too large. Learn how this noise is transferred Read Article
How to Control Switching Signals with Terminations for Best Signal Quality How to Control Switching Signals with Terminations for Best Signal Quality A transmission line is a pair of conductors used to deliver energy in the form of an electromagnetic field. Most of us are familiar with the wires that lead to our houses to deliver the power needed to operate our lights and appliances. In the context of PCB design, it is a signal in a signal layer on top of a plane or between two planes. TRANSMISSION LINES AND TERMINATIONS The purpose of this section is to explain what transmission lines are Read Article
Building Your Treasure Trove of Component Information Building Your Treasure Trove of Component Information Learn about PCB data Management and how it interrelates to the PCB Design process and roles of everyone involved. According to the business dictionary, a process is defined as: “A sequence of interdependent and linked procedures which, at every stage, consume one or more resources (employee time, energy, machines, money) to convert inputs (data, material, parts, etc.) into outputs. These outputs then serve as inputs for the next stage until a Read Article
Systems and Structures to Avoid the Sound of Deadlines Whooshing By Systems and Structures to Avoid the Sound of Deadlines Whooshing By Adopt the SMART rules of PCB Data Management and avoid additional cost and/or lost design time. When we begin to look in more detail at how to do anything, it becomes a little problematic. The reason is that every organization varies in product, structure and management requirements. We can guarantee that there will not be a “single” answer or solution to the questions at hand. My intention therefore is not to prescribe a sole structure or Read Article
Drinking From the Firehose of PCB Data Drinking From the Firehose of PCB Data There are several problems that are directly impacting the PCB Design area and specifically the PCB Data Management. For some time, it has not been business as usual, it is vital to understand these issues and develop a good strategy to handle them. With the invention of the internet, civilization dragged itself (sometimes kicking and screaming) out of the industrial age and into the “Information Age”, as an official description of the 21st Read Article
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