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PCB Design
The Best PCB Design Software Tools and How They Work
Using the right tools can save you lots of time, money, and frustration no matter what type of design you intend to realize. The old adage “work smarter, not harder” definitely applies to printed board design. Great PCB design software will provide the tools you need to work intelligently, instead of frustrating you with awkward features. Your choice of EDA software is subjective to your design needs. Most of the time it comes down to having the
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Quality Tips and Tricks To Help You Get Your Layer Stack Right
What are PCBs? PCBs are Printed Circuit Boards and they are the heart of everything electronic. The circuit board offer mechanical support and create an electrical connection between several electronic components with the aid of pads, conductive tracks, and several other features which are made from copper sheets and laminated onto non-conductive substrates. The PCB is also a housing unit on which several components (resistors, capacitors or
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Manual Routing vs Using an Automated Router: Why Auto-Interactive Routing Is the Ideal PCB Design Solution
I have been designing printed boards for a long time. Like most experienced PCB designers, I have my reservations about autorouters. Autorouters have a reputation for being difficult to set up and run, taking a long time to work, and giving questionable results. Often you would put your board into the router in the evening only to find the next morning that the results were not worth saving. I knew designers who would spend hours and hours
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Bill of Materials in Supply Chain Management: Part Inventory Control
Sending information to other departments and personnel is a regular part of the PCB design process. For purchasing, their part of this process starts when engineering sends them a bill of materials () for a new design. At this point in the design cycle, the is a preliminary document and it is constantly changing as are added, updated, or eliminated during the design cycle. The problem for purchasing is that this constantly changing data impacts
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High Speed PCB Design Considerations: Component Shapes Considerations
When starting a high speed PCB design, there’s a lot that must be considered before the design ever gets into layout. Schematic organization , board materials & layer configuration , critical component placement, and how high speed signals are to be routed are all aspects of high speed design that need to be planned for. Often there is one area that doesn’t get as much consideration as everything else, and that is the component footprint shapes
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Stripline vs Microstrip: PCB Routing Differences and Guidelines
Traces in a PCB are given two possible names based on their location in a PCB stackup: striplines and microstrips. In a PCB, a stripline and microstrip are two different transmission line structures used in a PCB layout. Microstrips and striplines also come in the coplanar and differential varieties, and all of these have certain advantages when used for high-speed or high-frequency signals. If you're looking for a thorough comparison of
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Keep Learning, Tackling 3D and Making and Hacking! OnTrack Newsletter September 2017
On Track Newsletter September 2017 VOL. 1 No 6 Welcome to the September edition of Altium’s On Track Newsletter. This month PCB designer extraordinaire, Susy Webb, shares her tireless passion and continual pursuit of excellence in Design Like a Girl. In the On Track video series, John Magyar illustrates why 3D is a truly powerful tool and not just a gimmick for designers. Lastly, we take a peek inside the wild and wonderful world of makers and
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PCB BOM Management: Spend Less Time on Your BOM and Reduce Delays in Manufacturing
Real-time solutions with management tools Cafeterias in colleges, summer camps, and schools are often known for serving up food that has a consistent quality and similar ingredients. For the kids who are tired of eating spaghetti with meatballs, this approach to food production is a downer. However, from a manufacturing point of view, using standard ingredients with minimal variety makes for efficient production. This is also true in circuit
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Facial Recognition Applications in IoT Wearables
One of the coolest tech things I saw in movies and couldn’t wait to see in the real world was retina scanning. I want to feel like James Bond or some other spy when I unlock my house or go into my office at work. I never thought biometrics could get any cooler than that, but Apple expanded my horizons the other day. The new iPhone X is equipped with state-of-the-art 3D IOT face recognition technology. Using a variety of sensors, they’re now able
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3D PCB Design: A Gimmick or Feature?
John Magyar, an expert in complex PCBs, explains 3D features in PCB design software that help to resolve common problems earlier in the design process. What if routine placement issues could be discovered early? Welcome to the future of PCB design. You can now export a full 3D assembly and that's no gimmick! Learn more about working in 3D PCB design tools here: https://www.altium.com
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PCB Design Tools at Maker Faire Open Source Hardware Summit
In response to a grassroots swell of “makers” , Maker Media launched the first Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. By 2014 over 215,000 attendees flocked to their two flagship events in New York city and San Francisco. Over the years, these large events spawned Featured Maker Faires, Mini-Maker Faires and School Maker Faires all around the world. If you’ve not heard of or been to a Maker Faire, I think their website describes it
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Susy Webb On Self-guided Learning, Success and PCB Design Conferences
Judy Warner : Susy, tell us about where you work and what kind of PCBs you design? Susy Webb : I work for Fairfield Nodal in Houston , which makes oil exploration and monitoring equipment for land and ocean environments. The devices we make are spread out in an area and pick up energy waves that are sent down into the earth and return. Those energy waves can be interpreted and give an idea if there may be oil deposits in the earth in a given area
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PCB Solutions: Why a Single PCB Standalone Door Access Controllers System Is Not a Secure Design
Editorial credit: Vasin Lee / Shutterstock.com While I don’t crave the latest iPhone X—the one where Apple removed the home button—it sure brought me down memory lane to my first mobile phone. I’ll always have a soft spot for that flip phone, but what I won’t miss is carrying my phone, a digital camera, and an MP3 player with me everywhere I went. Smartphones, which brought these key features—and more—into one device, seem like an inevitable
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Current Limiting Resistor LED Systems with Matching Voltage Power Supply
Most of my friends in engineering live a balanced lifestyle. However, there are some engineers that are workaholics. These engineers do not limit their working hours and are constantly dealing with stress. Their lifestyle is not so different from an LED’s that is directly connected to a power supply without a current limiting resistor or with the wrong resistor value. They start out strong, but eventually flicker and burn out. In the architecture
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Conveying Your PCB Design Intent with PCBA Drawing Creation in Draftsman
For many businesses, drawing creation is a critical step that may be neglected during product development. Sometimes, these drawings just take too long to create due to the level of detail involved. In other cases, companies might rely on an external contractor or their manufacturer to create their drawings. Alternatively, electronics companies that are creating their own drawings are usually doing so with mechanical drafting applications, which
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Where Will the Next Generation of PCB Designers Come From? OnTrack Newsletter August 2017
On Track Newsletter August 2017 VOL. 1 No 5 Welcome to the August edition of Altium’s On Track Newsletter. It seems like every electronics industry event where PCB designers gather, the conversation inevitably drifts to questions about where the next generation of PCB designers are going to come from. The old guard is retiring, yet their replacements don’t appear to be filling the vacancies they leave behind. From my perspective, I see many ways
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