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PCB Design

Designing High Integrity Systems

Designing High Integrity Systems It was not long after the first electrical devices were conceived that they were being used in situations where their failure could have disastrous consequences. This could be delivering a fatal electric shock to the user or failing to apply the brakes on a speeding vehicle; electrical devices are used everywhere and for almost every conceivable purpose. Medical devices are now routinely embedded into a patient’s body to regulate their heartbeat Read Article

Transmission Line Reflection Coefficient

Transmission Line Reflection Coefficient View a numerical example of the transmission line reflection coefficient and how simulations can help you understand the results. Read Article

Thermal Management for Integrated Circuits

IC Thermal Analysis: Thermal Management for Integrated Circuits As anyone who designs and builds electronic devices knows, the device will generate heat when it’s switched on. Wherever current flows through an impedance, energy losses will manifest themselves as heat, thanks to thermodynamics laws, whether in components, connections, wiring, or the PCB. The greater the loss, the greater the excess heat generated. While components with thermally enhanced packages are available to help manage any heat generated Read Article

Moisture Sensitivity in Electrical Components

Moisture Sensitivity Levels in Electrical Components A range of materials used to construct electrical components can absorb moisture from the air over time. This initially became a problem with introducing reflow soldering, where the components are subjected to sudden high temperatures over a short period. This was then exacerbated with the switch to lead-free solder, which resulted in higher peak temperatures during the reflow process. Other factors that have increased the prevalence of moisture Read Article

Real-World Monitoring with Encoders

Real-World Monitoring with Encoders Electrical devices don't tend to be useful unless they can interact with the real world, taking measures, producing outputs, or responding to events, for example. One functional ability that devices may require is the capability to measure physical movement. This may be a wheeled vehicle traveling across a surface or a fixed machine's shaft rotation. An encoder is a sensor that turns a position into an electrical signal. This position may be Read Article

Best Practices for Using PCB Reference Designs

Best Practices for Using PCB Reference Designs Reference designs can help you get started building a new system, but watch out for these pitfalls if you plan to use reference designs for your PCB. Read Article

Four Commonly Held Myths of EMC Design

Four Commonly Held Myths of EMC Design “Don't gap your ground plane, there's never really a good reason to do that.” Dr. Hubing our guest for today is an EMC expert with 30 years of experience in the industry. Watch this episode or listen on the go now. Read Article

Anatomy of Latitude Part One: Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) as a Result of the Evolution of Linear Systems

Anatomy of Latitude Part One: Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) as a Result of the Evolution of Linear Systems Great Ideas and Smart Solutions There are different techniques in the world of technology to achieve various goals, both final and intermediate. Some techniques are so successful that they are commonly used with high efficiency. Electronics is no exception. Great ideas and ingenious solutions are found and applied in this area probably more than in other engineering fields. The greatest example is the use of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signals Read Article

Overview of Passive and Active Heat Dissipation Techniques

How to Dissipate Heat: Overview of Passive and Active PCB Heat Dissipation Techniques Do you know which PCB heat dissipation techniques are best for your board? Here’s everything you need to know about active and passive PCB heat dissipation techniques and materials. Read Article

Thermal Simulation and Analysis Software for Printed Circuit Design

Using PCB Thermal Simulation and Analysis Software in Your Design Workflow Streamline your PCB thermal analysis workflow with Altium Designer and Altium 365. Read Article

Thermal Relief Design Guide for Your PCB

Thermal Relief Design Guide The CAD tools in Altium Designer are ideal for thermal relief design for SMD pads and through-hole pins. Read Article

PCB Thermal Resistance: Theory and Management

PCB Thermal Resistance: Theory and Management The thermal conductivity of your PCB material stackup and arrangement of copper conductors are important factors that determine the thermal performance of your circuit board. You will likely need to include strategically placed thermal vias, a heat sink on each active component and power electronics, and active cooling measures near any other heat source on your circuit board. Copper in printed circuits has high thermal conductivity, while FR4 Read Article

How to Design with Thermal Pad vs. Paste in Your Circuit Board

PCB Heat Sinks: Thermal Pad vs. Paste in Your Circuit Board Design Using thermal pads vs paste is an important decision when deciding how to best attach a heat sink to a power-hungry component like a CPU. Each of these materials gives the important benefit of heat transfer and reduced temperature, but there are other points to be considered when using a heat sink with a thermal pad or thermal paste. Assembly houses also need to know which option a design will use, requiring that clear documentation be provided Read Article

Your Complete Guide to Circuit Board Thermal Analysis

Your Complete Guide to PCB Thermal Analysis The physical properties of your PCB substrate and copper conductors are the main factors determining how a circuit board will heat up during operation. Circuit board thermal analysis techniques aim to predict when and where a board will heat up during operation, as well as how hot the board will get. This important part of the analysis is geared to ensure component-level and board-level reliability, and it can influence many design decisions Read Article

How to Design an AC to DC Converter Circuit in Altium Designer

How to Design an AC to DC Converter Circuit in Altium Designer An AC-to-DC converter circuit does exactly as its name implies: it takes a harmonic AC input and converts it to a DC output. These circuits are simply from a high level and when operating at low power on a breadboard, but a real AC to DC converter circuit is more complex than just a transformer and rectifier circuit. Finding the right components for these circuits and running accurate power simulations takes the right PCB design software that Read Article

PCB Footprint Creation and Reuse with Altium 365

PCB Footprint Creation and Reuse with Altium 365 Many components come in standardized packages, but not all component manufacturers provide CAD models and schematic symbols in their PCB libraries. These CAD models show the location of pins, silkscreen information, centroids, and pads as they should appear in your PCB layout. PCB component creation can get repetitive when you need to apply an existing PCB footprint to a new component. With the component creation tools in Altium Designer and the Read Article

Managing Symbol and PCB Footprint Libraries with Altium 365

Managing Symbol and PCB Footprint Libraries with Altium 365 When you need to collaborate on printed circuit design projects, you have a few options for sharing data. Your projects need to contain schematic symbols and PCB footprints in order to be opened on another computer, and the old ways of sharing this data are inefficient. If you have access to a cloud application that integrates with your PCB design tools, sharing data becomes easy, and you won’t be prone to neglecting shared data. Altium 365 Read Article