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The most powerful, modern and easy-to-use PCB design tool for professional use

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PCB Design

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PDN Analyzer Simulation of 65W Single IC LED Driver In my last article, I designed a 65W LED driver for powering a 36V LED string at 1.8A. The small MSOP-8 IC on it is going to get quite warm, which makes me believe the power distribution network is worth simulating with PDN Analyzer. This will allow me to see if there are any spots that need optimization on the board. Anywhere I can reduce the current density in high-current areas to ensure a lower copper temperature will be worth the time Read Article

Reflecting on Your Design, Part 2, What Do Reflections Do to a Signal? In part 1 of this article, I described what transmission line reflections are, how they are created and what the resulting waveforms look like. This part of the article will discuss what reflections do to a signal. Figure 1 is a typical 5V CMOS driver driving a 50-ohm transmission line that is 12 inches or approximately 2 nanoseconds long. There is a CMOS receiver at the end of the line that is a tiny parasitic capacitor. For these purposes, it Read Article

Any Angle Routing: When Should You Use It? This is what any angle routing looks like... EDA tools have come a long way since the advent of personal computing. Now advanced routing features like auto-routers, interactive routing, length tuning, and pin-swapping are helping designers stay productive, especially as device and trace densities increase. Routing is normally restricted to 45-degree or right angle turns with typical layout and routing tools, but more advanced PCB design software Read Article

Image Processing Embedded Systems with Modular Hardware Image processing embedded systems can be deployed quickly thanks to modular design tools With advances in industrial automation, automotive technology, remote sensing, and much more, image processing is taking center stage in many embedded systems. Image processing with older video systems was difficult or impossible due to the low quality of many imaging systems with perpetual uptime. As a result, older camera systems could be developed for Read Article

The Shrinking Manufacturing Cycle Traditionally, an engineering cycle has been considered to be on the order of 18 months. That’s the time between generations of products, whether it’s a new processor or a new Internet appliance. Today, a company that operates on an 18-month cycle is considered slow within many industries. If you have a lot of competitors, their release cycles are likely out of phase from yours. For example, if there are three companies serving an application Read Article

Leveraging the Ecosystem Being a great designer requires discipline. Most designers love to create, and design is an end in and of itself. This is fine when you design as a hobby. After all, the point isn’t getting the project done more than it is to enjoy oneself. When you design as a business, this all changes. Usually there’s some sort of clock ticking, like you only have so much money saved up before your business needs to start generating some income to pay for Read Article

Using Low-Volume Runs to Eliminate High-Volume Failures “High volume” is a relative term. It depends upon what your business does and how many of a product you plan to sell. For one OEM, a minimum initial run might be 250K units. For another, 10K is the expected run of a product across its entire market life. One way to consider “high volume” is that it’s large enough to hurt your business if you make a mistake. Put another way, high volume is high risk. And given the stakes, you want to minimize this Read Article

Real-Prototyping World There’s something to be said about the difference between designing your system on an evaluation board compared to designing it using the board on which your system is actually going to ship. One of the problems with using an evaluation board is that it’s a really nice environment to work in. Too nice, in some respects. The processor company wants you to have a positive experience with their chip so the eval board has all the bells and whistles Read Article

Riding Technology Waves There’s tremendous value in being able to utilize the latest and greatest technology on the market. Of course, the leading edge is sharp and there are ways you can cut yourself if you aren’t careful. In general, though, having the flexibility to choose where you ride technology waves enables you to better balance the overall performance, cost, and power efficiency as you design systems. I remember an industrial embedded system I was optimizing Read Article

Quit Bouncing Around Bounce on a single-pole, double-throw (SPDT) switch with normally closed (NC) contact opening and normally open (NO) contact closing (Image source: David Ashton) In an earlier column -- Say "Hello" to the LogiSwitch Workbench -- I introduced a rather clever shield for the Arduino Uno. This little scamp allows you to break out all of the Arduino's analog and digital input/output (I/O) pins, along with the 5V, 3V3, and GND pins, to three full-size Read Article

All Hail the Evo Compute Module The Evo Compute Module (small board) mounted on an EvoTray (larger board) (Image source: Alorium Technology) I was just chatting with my chum Jason Pecor at Alorium Technology. We bounced around from topic to topic with the agility of much younger men. At some stage in our conversation, Jason mentioned a forthcoming product called the Evo Compute Module, which really grabbed my attention. I'll tell you all I know in a minute (it won’t take long) Read Article

Accelerating Board Bring Up There’s that moment when you power up the first production board for a new design. It doesn’t matter how perfectly the prototypes operated. The question, “Is it going to work?”, still hangs in the air. At its best, this process is exciting. At its worst, you find yourself with an intermittent but persistent problem that means you need to spend more time and money. Today, there are a great variety of off-the-shelf boards available to jumpstart Read Article

Go From Maker to Pro We are in the Golden Age of development. Never before has it been possible for individuals to design complex electronic systems with as much ease, simplicity, AND functionality. Someone with a hobby in electronics used to stick to simple projects like turning on LEDs or making a radio hum to life. Now nearly anyone can build sensor-based hardware that can be controlled through a phone app and submit data to the cloud for remote analysis and Read Article

Creating High Pin Count Schematic Symbols Quickly My open source Altium component library contains hundreds of schematic symbols, supplying over 100,000 components for use. People are often surprised when I tell them it only takes a few minutes to make a schematic symbol using Altium, even if the part has a high pin count. In this article, I want to show you how you can leverage some of the tools in Altium to create your own symbols quickly. Pre-requisites Before we get started, you’ll need a Read Article

Should You Use Your Power Plane as a Return Path? If only tracing the return path in a power plane were this easy... Power planes and ground planes are important for more than just distribution of supply and return power. When defining reference planes, both with impedance controlled routing and in managing return paths, your stackup might force return currents to pass into a power plane before being coupled back to a ground layer. Let’s take a look at some good practices for controlling return Read Article

Lies Your Fabricator May Have Told You In some of our previous articles, we have talked about the various things that go wrong when a board design is turned over to the fabricator for manufacturing. Sometimes, the things that can go awry are due to design errors but the bulk of them can be ascribed to errors incurred during the fabrication process. This article will describe the errors that can be encountered and what, if anything, can be done to avoid them. We have previously Read Article

Using Prepreg vs. Core for Controlled Impedance Routing Are you designing for controlled impedance on the right layer material? When I was first learning the finer points of PCB design, my first impression that the core was some type of special material. This is not necessarily the case, and designers have some freedom to choose the core/prepreg arrangement that works best for their needs. When it comes to controlled impedance routing, especially at high frequencies, the use of core or prepreg layers Read Article