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PCB Design

H-bridge Full Wave Rectifier

Beginner's Guide to H-bridge Full Wave Rectifier Design Need to start a new power conversion design? You’ll probably need an H-bridge full-wave rectifier to produce a stable DC output. Read Article

Energy Harvesting

Energy Harvesting Sensors for Medical Devices and Remote Sensors Harvesting energy from the environment is an increasingly popular technique for powering electrical devices. Let’s discuss sources and implementation. Read Article

How Important is your Microcontroller Clock Source

How Important is Your Microcontroller Clock Source? The type of clock signal you need to use for your microcontroller will depend mainly on the nature of the device it’s embedded in and its operating environment. Read Article

MMw and RF Interaction

MMw and RF Interaction John will generously share with us today a glimpse of his recent keynote presentation at PCB West 2021. Watch now, and don't miss this rare opportunity to learn from expert John Coonrod. Read Article

copper pour and via stitching

Copper Pour and Via Stitching: Do You Need Them in a PCB Layout? When is it appropriate to use copper pour or via stitching in your PCB layout? Read our guide on copper pour and how it can be used properly with via stitching. Read Article

PCB Design and Review Checklist

PCB Design Review Checklist It’s essential to check a board for issues before production or prototyping. Here’s an extensive checklist you can adapt or use directly for PCB design review. Read Article

1 oz copper weight

Do You Always Need 1 oz. Copper Thickness on Each Layer? 1 oz. copper thickness is often seen as a standard thickness value used in many designs. Here’s when you might need thicker copper on every layer. Read Article

Getting Started with ESP8266

Getting Started With ESP8266 A project overview on getting started with the ESP8266 device. Expert Ari Mahpour reviews the benefits of using a device such as the NodeMCU board from HiLetgo and how to get up and running with a few examples. Read Article

Getting Started with MQTT

Getting Started with MQTT and Arduino Uno Check this out. This is a new project overview demonstrating MQTT by expert Ari Mahpour. In this article, Ari answers the What and Why of MQTT, and gives guidelines to get your project started. Read Article

PCB silkscreen

PCB Silkscreen Guidelines PCB silkscreen helps ensure your board is easy to read and test, and it aids assembly by clearly indicating component locations. Read Article

The Wheel Keeps Turning: Advanced Bill of Materials for PCB Design

The Wheel Keeps Turning: Advanced Bill of Materials for PCB Design At a young age, my grandfather was trained in the repair and construction of wooden wheels, which was a necessary skill on the rural farm where he was raised. When modern times finally found Eastern Missouri, that highly skilled confluence of woodworking and blacksmithing was totally replaced by modern technology, save for the occasional historical re-creation. The change had been inevitable, so my grandfather proactively added machining Read Article

What Skills Are Needed to be a PCB Designer?

What Skills Are Needed to be a PCB Layout Designer? To readers who have been working in the PCB industry for most of your career, you have probably seen a very diverse group of professionals with varied skill sets and backgrounds. My own background is odd, having come into the profession from optics and lasers, and then focusing on analog and RF electronics. Other designers might get started as engineers or as technicians, and some designers learn how to create beautiful PCB layouts in university Read Article

SpaceX and Other Advanced Technologies Require Multi Board PCB Innovations

SpaceX and Other Advanced Technologies Require Multi Board PCB and CAD Software Innovations When I was in middle school I used to love to build and fly model rockets. We had a rocket club at school and except for the number of rockets that I littered the trees with, it was a lot of fun. One thing was certain though, although the rockets we launched went up, no one knew exactly where they might come down. Suspended by their parachutes (assuming that those chutes actually deployed as intended), they might land anywhere. Recently I watched Read Article

Phalanx, not Failure: PCB Shielding to Protect Your Design

Phalanx, not Failure: PCB Circuit Shielding to Protect Your Design During 7 B.C., Greek soldiers—or hoplites--carried a large, concave, circular pcb shield called the hoplon. Made from bronze and wood, the hoplon or Argive shield protected hoplites from chin to knee and—when overlapped—became the basis for the Greek phalanx. At the beginning of the 20th century, Ethiopians used their shields when fighting against an invading Italian army. The constant banging on the shields by the Ethiopians mingled with war Read Article

PCB Designers for SpaceX and Beyond: Yesterday’s Fiction, Tomorrow’s Reality

PCB Designers for SpaceX and Beyond: Yesterday’s Fiction, Tomorrow’s Reality I’ve wanted a career in engineering for as long as I can remember. There were people who could MacGyver something out of nothing and I wanted to be one of those people. I’m sure that watching science fiction on TV added a lot to that. I mean, who wouldn’t want to manipulate technology and control immense power like “Scotty” on Star Trek? I found out that I’m not alone in those dreams—apparently, Scotty was the inspiration for much interest in Read Article

IOT Security Modules: Modular Hardware for Software Engineers

IOT Security Modules: Modular Hardware for Software Engineers From PCB designed in CircuitStudio to Zymbit finished product The Internet of Things - Big Promise or Big Problem? By 2023 the IoT promises to be 50 billion connected devices strong, transacting $8 Trillion of economic value! That’s orders of magnitude bigger and much more complex than anything we have seen before, and current models of development, deployment, device management and IoT security don’t easily translate to this new world disorder Read Article

microstrip to ground clearance

Microstrip PCB Ground Clearance Part 2: How Clearance Affects Losses In a previous article, I provided a discussion and some simulation results on the necessary clearance between impedance controlled traces and nearby grounded copper pour. What we found was that, once the spacing between the pour and the trace becomes too small, the trace becomes an impedance-controlled coplanar waveguide (with or without ground). We also saw that the 3W rule for the spacing between the trace and the grounded copper pour is a bit Read Article