PCB Design

Read the latest information PCB Design from the industry's leading experts.

A Short Tour Through The PCB Design Process In several previous articles, I have addressed the PCB design process in terms of the tools involved, the basics of electromagnetic behavior on transmission lines, signal integrity, power delivery design and numerous other PCB design-related topics. But, one of the most important basics is to have a good sense of the factors that are considered to have the fastest design flow. This info spans the buses and types of signals including operating Read Article

Bandwidth Requirements For Differential Signals This article provides an overview of the benefits of differential signaling and how it operates in a working electronic product. Read Article

The Switching Behavior Of A Series-Terminated Transmission Line Series-terminated lines and differential signals serve as the links in all CMOS devices. While I have written extensively on differential signaling, its operations and its benefits, I have not addressed the switching behavior of a series-terminated line. That is the purpose of this article. The Basics The salient points about a series-terminated transmission line include the following: In this type of transmission line, a series termination is Read Article

Developing a PCB Testing Procedure for New Designs As noted in several of my previous articles, at Speeding Edge, we are big proponents of putting test structures into PCBs. The impetus for incorporating these structures covers a wide variety of topics—it’s a new design; you’re using new component technology; a new laminate or a new fabricator to name a few. There are many critical performance characteristics required of today’s electronic products. They operate at high frequencies, move enormous Read Article

Modeling PCB Interconnects as Causal Systems Real PCB interconnects are causal systems and must be modeled with the correct time-dependent behavior. Read Article

IoT PCB Design: It's More Than Just Hardware Development IoT products are lovely and sometimes frustrating products. Design teams need to be multifunctional to design these products successfully. They need to get the hardware, embedded software, web platform and/or app, and mechanical enclosure perfect if they want to see market success. Problems in any of these areas mean your new product will be substandard and, eventually, competitive products will win market share. So what does it take to ensure Read Article

The History and Use of Cross-Hatched Planes Read to learn all about hatch ground in your PCB instead of using ground planes. You'll learn about how this type of ground region impacts signal integrity. Read Article

The Benefits of High-Dk PCB Materials The terms “high-speed design” and “low-Dk PCB laminate” are often used in the same articles, and often in the same sentence. Low-Dk PCB materials have their place in high speed and high-frequency PCBs, but high-Dk PCB materials provide power integrity. Low-Dk PCBs are typically chosen as they tend to have lower loss tangent. Thus high-DK PCB materials tend to get overlooked for high speed and high-frequency PCBs. When we look at power integrity Read Article

Which Type of Capacitor Should You Use? Capacitors are used in far more applications than just bypassing noise, and there are many more types of capacitors than just ceramic and aluminium electrolytic. Read Article

A Guide to Challenging Projects Starting a project? Here's an expert advise from Mark Harris to get you through challenging design projects. Read this blog and see if this method will work for you. Read Article

The Increasingly Important Role Of Dielectric Loss Tangent In PCB Laminates Learn more about dielectric loss tangent, the role it plays in high-speed designs, and how it varies as a result of the glass to resin ratio and frequency. Read Article

Solder Bridge Jumper Best Practices in PCB Design A PCB variant is often simply thought of as a new layout created from an old design. However, if you’re creative with your routing and layout, you can use a solder bridge jumper to configure portions of a single PCB layout for multiple variants. This lets you quickly create variants of a PCB layout without rerouting traces or changing your schematics. If you plan to use jumpers in your PCB layout, there are some important guidelines to follow to Read Article

Prepare to Share: How to Make the Most of Collaborative PCB Design Before you start sharing design data, run through this checklist to make sure collaborative PCB design is a productive experience. Read Article

Perfect Boards Every Time (With Free Templates) Gone are the days of obsessing over the formatting of schematics. Draftsman®, embedded within Altium Designer®, could radically change your workflow for the better. Read Article

CAN-Bus: Designing CAN-Bus Circuitry This article is part of a three-part introductory series on the CAN-bus: Part 1: An Informal Introduction Part 2: The Protocol Part 3: Designing CAN-Bus Circuitry Introduction There are three main components in a CAN-bus node: Microprocessor CAN-bus controller CAN-bus transceiver The CAN-bus controller implements all the low-level features of the network protocol, ISO 11898–1, while the transceiver communicates with the physical layer. Different Read Article

Robert Feranec and IoT Security The AltiumLive Virtual Summit is just around the corner! So in a unique episode of OnTrack, we share clips of Robert Feranec, motherboard designer and founder and CEO of Fedevel Academy, speaking on such topics as IoT device security in an increasingly connected world, the pitfalls of underestimating the complexity of your fellow stakeholder’s job, and the value of attending AltiumLive. This is a short and impactful episode you shouldn’t miss. Read Article

Getting Through Agile Prototyping in Agile Hardware Development If you’ve worked in software development, such as in web design or enterprise software design, you know how difficult it can be to get clients to understand the look and feel of a product from a static wireframe. We’ve had the same problem in recent projects, especially when the POC was not a technical person. The client ultimately had to take it on faith that we knew what we were doing and could deliver what we promised. There’s no substitute Read Article