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PCB Design

22:06 SKA Africa Telescope and Multiboard PCB Design [OnTrack Podcast] Watch Video

Ambitious Students, Makers and Innovators

Ambitious Students, Makers and Innovators In the number three spot is a solar car team from the University of Waterloo in Toronto, Canada: The Midnight Sun Solar Car team. Relive the guts and the glory of this ambitious team. Congratulations, Midnight Sun Solar Team. Thank you for your pursuit of excellence and being an inspiration for our readers! Taking the number two spot is the New Jersey Institute of Technology SAE Baja team that earned first place in the endurance race, and 13th Read Article

Three Exceptional Professional PCB Designers

Three Exceptional Professional PCB Designers I've had the opportunity to interview several exceptional professionals in PCB Design this past year, which includes interviewing this popular group of engineers. Here are the most popular articles in our Professional PCB Designers series: In the number three spot is a beloved professional designer, BSEE, and a CID Master Instructor who also has a passion for golfing... Cherie Litson. Congratulations Cherie and thank you for contributing so much Read Article

Picking the Right Bluetooth Antenna for Your PCB Design

Picking the Right Bluetooth Antenna Types for Your PCB Design Have you ever tried tracing your wireless usage? Bluetooth PCB antenna design has gotten our bluetooth electronics everywhere by allowing devices to connect to a standardized matching network. For instance, I am streaming music from my phone to wireless headphones. Later, I’ll hop into my car and take phone calls through my hands-free computer system. Then I can get home and talk to my home-assistants to tell me the weather, set dinner timers Read Article

Suppress Noise and EMI in Your PCB With the Right Analog Filter Design

Suppress Noise and EMI in Your PCB With the Right Analog Filter Design The electronics industry continues to pack more capabilities onto smaller PCBs and devices are being run at lower power and at higher frequencies. Noise suppression becomes even more important as operating frequencies rise and signal levels fall, this becomes more manageable with an EMI filter for noise on a PCB design. Adding filtration to your PCB designs can enhance signal integrity in EMI-prone environments with large stray magnetic fields Read Article

Avoid Signal Integrity Loss While Using a Fanout Strategy in Your PCB

Avoid Signal Integrity Loss While Using a Fanout Strategy in Your PCB When I was much, much younger, I looked at the pin layout on the back of a processor and wondered how anyone can possibly route all of those electrical connections on a PCB. I didn’t know much about signal integrity, of fanouts on PCBs then but fast forward fifteen years and now I get to layout those traces on PCBs. Fanout is a technique where short traces and vias are used to connect inner rows of pins on high pin-count ICs. Fanout can also Read Article

Coatings vs Resins for Your PCB: What’s Best for Providing Protection?

Coatings vs Resins for Your PCB: What’s Best for Providing Protection? In today’s world, protection is always a welcome asset. Whether it be protection from the rain above your head (mitigated by a roof), protection from the sun (mitigated by sunscreen), or protection from electromagnetic currents (mitigated by current isolation techniques amongst others). With resin and conformal coating for your PCB, you can think about the forces that attack your PCB from a physical (environmental) standpoint - beyond EMI Read Article

PCB Design Software Shortcuts to Speed Up Your PCB Designs

Learning the PCB Design Software Shortcuts to Hack Your Design Growth Even simple PCB designs can require the use of many functions and tools, and this doesn’t change if you’ve been a designer for 20-minutes or 20-years. One feature that will always make your PCB design software more efficient is using keyboard shortcuts. So how can you improve your efficiency beyond where it's at now? With a little help from Altium Designer and the shortcuts they’ve so graciously added to the program! No matter how quick your Read Article

Working with Altium Designer’s Multilayered Via Routing Rules

Routers in PCB Boards: Working with Altium Designer’s Multilayered Via Routing Rules Some of the first ideas and drawings of two-layered PCB design came at the turn of the century, right before the world would descend into its first world war. It should come as a surprise that an idea and an adaptation to circuit boards, two-layers, developed over one-hundred years ago is still alive and well. But it should come as no surprise that with time comes new adaptations, and the era of multilayered stackups is much more appropriate for Read Article

1:55 Routing Modes . Watch Video

Using the New Select Filter When Selecting Objects in Altium Designer

Using the New Select Filter When Selecting Objects in Altium Designer Whether you are making changes or deletions one thing is for certain, you are going to be selecting a lot of design objects in your design as you work on it. Altium Designer has introduced the select filter that will make the task of selecting objects much easier than before. This enables you to configure your design session so that you can select specific object types to work on. When you have an area in your schematic or PCB layout that is very Read Article

Keep Your Altium Designer PCB Layout in Line with Grids and Grid-Selection Shortcuts

Keep Your Altium Designer PCB Layout in Line with Grids and Grid-Selection Shortcuts The grid system in a printed circuit board design CAD program is a great tool for a PCB designer, and it's a system worth knowing. Altium Designer^® has a well designed grid system that you can use to your advantage in your PCB designs and schematic captures. Before all the different snap and placement utilities that are now available in CAD systems, we used to have to constantly manipulate the grid to place objects at different locations. It Read Article

Generate Gerber Files in Altium Designer Step-by-Step from Schematic to PCB

How to Make PCB Gerber Files in Altium Designer Step-by-Step Looking for the best approach for CAM jobs? Learn how to make PCB Gerber files in Altium Designer from your circuit board layout. Altium's CAM tools can help you quickly create PCB Gerber files. Read Article

GPS Antennas in Your PCB Design: You Won’t Get Lost Again

GPS Antennas in Your PCB Design: You Won’t Get Lost Again Going on hunting trips with my grandpa as a kid, we would carry a rather large GPS-navigator to help us keep from getting lost in the woods. It had a huge antenna sticking out the top and its battery never lasted longer than a few hours. Fast forward 20 years, and including GPS capabilities in your PCB design has become easier than ever. Many new consumer devices include GPS PCB antenna modules in their design. If you don’t have GPS or RF-design Read Article

Dual-Band PCB Antenna Design: Keeping Your EMI In-Line

Dual-Band PCB Antenna Design: Keeping Your EMI In-Line If you were born in the 1980’s or earlier, you probably remember those old brick-like cell phones and their giant antennas. Fast forward to the present, and most people don’t even realize that their smartphones have antennas. Proposed antenna designs have come a long way since the 80’s, and new antennas can send and receive in more than one frequency band. As the mobile and IoT industry continues to advance, electronic devices continue to use Read Article

Preventing Ground Loops in Your PCB Design

Preventing Ground Loops in Your PCB Design I think we’ve all been there. You buy that awesome stereo system only to hear that familiar humming sound in the background. When you take it back to the store the clerk blames the manufacturer. What components are to be considered a problem? The decoupling capacitor or ground wire? How about the bypass capacitor or PCB ground loop design interference? The stereo manufacturer will blame the component manufacturer and the component manufacturer Read Article

Understanding Ground Planes in Your Two-Layer PCB

Understanding 2-Layer PCB Ground Planes Like many designers, my first board was a 2-layer board, and it didn't use a PCB ground plane. It wasn't very elaborate, just an amplifier with some connectors and a connection to a DAQ module that interfaced with a LabVIEW app. When you're designing with through-hole components on a copper-clad perfboard, there's no way to create a solid ground region anywhere on the board, and your grounding strategy will suffer for it. If you watch the Read Article