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Building Your Next Multi-Level Bill of Materials Building Your Next Multi-Level Bill of Materials My wife and I always argue about what goes on the grocery list each week. I’m a total carnivore, while she prefers I get everything we need from local farmers. Planning out our shopping trips in multiple lists does more than just allow us to plan our Saturdays coherently, it helps ensure marital bliss. Any PCB that you intend to manufacture will need an associated bill of materials. If you’re building a complex product that includes multiple sub Read Article
Managing 3D models Managing 3D Electrical MCAD/ECAD Models for Data Transfer Communication is tricky when oppositional semantics fail to play well together. This sentence is a good case in point. When ill stated, information is rarely understood. The same goes with software infrastructures. Many do not play well together when information in one is defined differently in another. 3D models of components for use by mechanical and electrical CAD programs are historically represented quite differently across platforms. This Read Article
Working with IPC Compliant Footprint Models Working with IPC Compliant Footprint Models Here's a guide to creating a component with an IPC compliant footprint. Altium Designer contains the tools you need to work with compliant footprint models. Read Article
OnTrack Newsletter: A Look Under the Hood at Altium Designer 19, and Is IPC CID Important for Your Career? - December 2018 OnTrack Newsletter: A Look Under the Hood at Altium Designer 19, and Is IPC CID Important for Your Career? - December 2018 OnTrack Newsletter December 2018 VOL. 2 No 8 ALTIUM ® 19 HAS ARRIVED! See the New Features of Altium 19 Altium 19 has just been released and features several exciting new and enhanced capabilities. Get a first look here at some of the functionality that defines the latest version of Altium . READ FULL ARTICLE IS IPC CID TRAINING IMPORTANT FOR YOUR DESIGN CAREER? Insights from CID IPC Trainer, Stephen Chavez Stephen Chavez is the lead electrical Read Article
From Mechanical Drilling to Laser Drilling of Microvias From Mechanical Drilling to Laser Drilling of PCB Microvias Miniaturization of PCB designs eventually forces a switch from mechanical drilling to laser drilling. Learn more about sizing vias for your next multilayer PCB. Read Article
Sizing Vias in Your Next Multilayer PCBs PCB Via Size Calculators: Sizing Vias in Multilayer Designs If you’ve ever opened up an old cell phone, you’ve likely noticed the intricate dance between traces and vias. These elements tango with the signal traces on inner board layers, and sizing them properly is as much art as it is science. Your vias are critical for accessing the inner layers in a multi-layer PCB. So how do you choreograph the balance between your vias, traces, and components? Your vias should be sized appropriately if they are to be Read Article
SMD LEDs in Your PCB and Your Bill of Materials SMD LEDs in Your PCB and Your Bill of Materials Unless you refuse to get out of the house on a Friday night (like me), you’ve probably been at a concert and had the privilege of being bathed in multi-colored lights from the stage. LED arrays provide a great concert experience, but I think that learning what makes them tick is far more interesting. Kingbright (KPKF) surface-mounted LEDs are probably my favorite LED to use on a PCB. They look clean on your board and they are available from a Read Article
Split PCB Plane Pours are Partial to Carefully Managed Connections Split PCB Plane Pours are Partial to Carefully Managed Connections James Madison said that “philosophy is common sense with big words.” Big words can produce a mess if applied with the wrong syntax. Similarly, the ability to produce intricate PCB designs requires extraordinary vision, each minute step exquisitely accomplished through common sense. Common sense and, if you’re lucky, elegant design tools. PCB design tools able to make common sense from complicated layout rules promote efficient development Read Article
Managing Net Connection Order from Schematic to Layout Managing Net Connection Order from Schematic to Layout When I first started designing printed circuit boards, it was a very unorganized process. We would create the schematics in our department, and then the system administrators would work their voodoo and transfer all that data from us into the layout department. The layout guys were an even bigger mystery, working all hours of the night and day on these complex Unix machines that supported their CAD layout tools. We would communicate our design Read Article
How Collaboration Changes with the Cloud Cloud Collab Design: How Collaboration Changes with the Cloud In this series of posts, we’ll take a good, hard look at how Cloud solutions play into the design and development of board systems. That includes detailing use cases for procurement, manufacturing, quality, service, and many more. However, before we go down that path, we need to cover some basics. You see, there are some general-isms that apply in each of these use cases. We’ll detail them here and reference them there. So, what’s our general-ism Read Article
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