Steve Williams on What Good Engineering Support Looks Like

Created: May 7, 2019
Updated: March 16, 2020

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Choosing the Right Microphone for Embedded Applications If you need to capture sound waves for your electrical device to process, you'll need a microphone. However, microphones these days have become very advanced, and there are so many options to choose from. While they are relatively small, they come with a broad range of options and technologies. They range from the relatively simple and popular condenser type microphones to state-of-the-art sound conversion solutions incorporating internal Read Article

Part 2: Why Your PCB Design Review Process Is Obsolete and What You Can Do About It As we established in Part 1, the PCB design review and collaboration practices have room for improvement in many organizations. To address this, we developed Altium 365. Let's examine how running a PCB project through Altium 365 compares to other methods. One source of truth, visibility, and version control To start using Altium 365, you need to create a workspace and a centralized location for your design files, libraries, and collaboration Read Article

Resources for the Lifelong Learner A few years ago, in a recap video of AltiumLive, Dr. Eric Bogatin, the Dean of Signal Integrity Academy, stated the following: “Everybody recognizes that you have to continually grow. It’s kind of like in Alice in Wonderland. Alice is in the Red Forest, and the line goes something like this: ‘in this forest, you have to run faster and faster, just to stay in the same place!’ And I think that encapsulates where the industry is today. The most Read Article

Can You Design a Rotation-Proof Connector Pinout? There are times where your connector pinout needs to be adaptable and reversible. What’s the easiest way to do this? Use a rotation-proof connector in your PCB. Read Article

Troubleshooting EMC Immunity Issues Most PCB Designers wear many hats, and one of them is to solve EMC problems. How can you acquire this skill that is not offered in the university? Watch now or listen on the go! Read Article

What is PCB Star Grounding and Why Would Anyone Use It? PCB star grounding can encourage bad design practices that lead to radiated EMI emissions in your PCB layout. Read Article

Part 1: Why Your PCB Design Review Process Is Obsolete and What You Can Do About It A printed circuit board (PCB) design review is a practice to review the design of a board for possible errors and issues at various stages of product development. It can range from a formal checklist with official sign-offs to a more free-form inspection of schematic drawings and PCB layouts. Some companies do it completely in-house, while others get help from design firms and contractors. In many cases, they involve their contract manufacturers Read Article

How to Route a PCB Learn about Routing a PCB and how to design traces to proper routing in any device. You can access the best PCB routing features in Altium Designer. Read Article

Controlled ESR Capacitors: Should You Use Them for Power Integrity? I can’t think of a single product I’ve built that doesn’t require capacitors. We often talk a lot about effective series inductance (ESL) in capacitors and its effects on power integrity. What about effective series resistance (ESR)? Is there a technique you can use to determine the appropriate level of resistance, and can you use ESR to your advantage? Like many answers to important engineering questions, the answer is “it depends.” One type of Read Article

Efficient Heat Dissipation with SMD Heat Sinks Keeps You From Dropping PCBs In electronics, there is the possibility that your PCB can get pretty hot due to power dissipation in certain components. Whenever a component reaches an extreme temperature that goes beyond a component's safe operating range, its lifetime will be greatly reduced or the component may fail immediately. The heat-producing component being defective means the entire PCBA will need to be scrapped. There are many things to consider when dealing with Read Article

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