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PCB Design

How to Design Your PCB Test Coupon and What You Can Test

How to Design Your PCB Test Coupon and What You Can Test As the operating speed of components has increased, controlled impedance is becoming more common in digital, analog, and mixed-signal systems. If the controlled impedance value for an interconnect is incorrect, it can be very difficult to identify this problem during an in-circuit test. Minor mismatches may not cause a board to fail, but it can be difficult to pinpoint incorrect impedance as the cause of any test failure, especially if correct Read Article

Driving Haptic Vibration and Feedback in Wearables

Driving Haptic Vibration and Feedback in Wearables Augmented reality, virtual surgery, limb replacements, medical devices, and other new technologies need to incorporate haptic vibration motors and feedback to give the wearer a full sense of how they are interacting with their environment. Unless these cutting-edge applications include haptic vibration and feedback, users are forced to rely on their other four senses to understand the real or virtual environment. Low cost components to support Read Article

Modeling Copper Foil Roughness in Altium Designer's Impedance Profiler

Modeling Copper Foil Roughness in Altium Designer's Impedance Profiler Advanced transmission line models for long interconnects require that designers include copper foil roughness calculations in order to determine accurate impedance. Without the right models or design software, you’ll be left to estimate the skin effect impedance, dispersion, and parasitics in your PCB. These models can be difficult to work with by hand if you’re not mathematically inclined, but the right design tools can be used to quickly Read Article

High-Speed Signal Routing: The 5 Important Routing Constraints

High-Speed Signal Routing: The 5 Important PCB Design Constraints Your modern digital board is most likely classified as high speed, regardless of whether you looked at the datasheets for your components. Designing your board successfully will take some important steps when you begin your design. Aside from floorplanning and stackup design, your routing strategy will need to operate within some important PCB design constraints. After you capture your schematic as an initial layout and create an initial Read Article

Debugging Power Supply Noise to Reduce Signal and Clock Jitter

How to Reduce Clock and Signal Jitter: Debugging Power Supply Noise Low level components need ultra-stable power, and high speed digital signals need to have repeatable edge transition times. The two aspects of digital signalling are related, and you’ll need to suppress all aspects of power supply noise to reduce jitter in a digital system. During a design debug, you’ll need to gather measurements throughout your board if you want to isolate and eliminate sources of power supply noise. Here’s how you can isolate Read Article

Phase noise measurement with spectrum analyzers

How to Take a Phase Noise Measurement in a PCB There are plenty of noise sources in your PCB, ranging from thermal noise to EMI received from external sources. Phase noise is one noise source that occurs in analog signal sources like reference oscillators and frequency synthesizers. This type of noise affects the timing of analog signals and it arises due to contributions from other noise sources. If you’re debugging a high frequency board with a reference oscillator, then you might need to Read Article

PCB Trace and Pad Clearance: Low vs. High Voltage

PCB Trace and Pad Clearance: Low vs. High Voltage High voltage/high current designs carry safety requirements that need to be met by designers. Similarly, high-speed designs need to have suppressed crosstalk in order to ensure signal integrity. The key design aspects that relate to both areas are your PCB trace clearance and pad clearance values. These design choices are critical for balancing safety, noise suppression, and manufacturability. The IPC 2221 voltage and spacing standards provide Read Article

Will these amplifiers be stable during operation? Here’s what you should know about amplifier stability in your PCB.

Amplifier Stability at High Frequencies and Stray Capacitance Amplifiers are one of those critical components that make modern life possible. From wireless communication to power electronics, amplifiers need to run stably and predictably for these products to work properly. Stability analysis is one of my favorite topics in physics and engineering, and it always tends to crop up in places you would least expect. One of these places is in amplifiers. Any time-dependent physical system with feedback and gain Read Article

Near-field vs. far-field radiation from a smartphone

Near-field and Far-field EMI: What's Causing Noise Problems in My PCB? If you’re an antenna designer, then you’re likely familiar with all aspects of near-field vs. far-field radiation. Given the litany of radiated EMI problems that cause noise within and outside of an electronic device, one might suddenly realize their new product is acting like a strong antenna. To understand how EMI affects your circuits, it helps to understand exactly how near-field vs. far-field radiation from your PCB affects your ability to Read Article

ADC Sampling Rate and Layout for Mixed Signal Boards

ADC Sampling Rate and Layout for Mixed Signal Boards Whenever you’re selecting an ADC, whether it is built into an MCU or as an external component, the sampling rate you will use is a prime consideration as it will determine how well you can reproduce a measured signal. Some RF applications, analog sensor boards, and other mixed-signal devices need at least one ADC with an appropriately chosen ADC sampling rate. If you’re designing with a mixed-signal board, you’ll need to balance the required Read Article

Getting Started in Altium Designer | Changing the Rules!

Getting Started in Altium Designer | Changing the Rules! The Altium Designer environment is controlled by rules, which are created using a powerful tool called the “PCB Rules and Constraints Editor”. By creating rules before component placement and routing starts, Altium can warn you or prevent you from making mistakes, depending on how your preferences are set. If rules are changed midstream, Altium’s sophisticated Design Rule Checker can highlight violations based on the revised rules, and report Read Article

Advanced Tools to Increase the Quality of PCB Manufacturing Documents

Advanced Tools to Increase the Quality of PCB Manufacturing Documents Guest writer Peter Smith shares tips for getting the best out of Altium Draftsman^®. When I started at a company relatively recently, I (and the other designers) were less than impressed with the quality of the manufacturing datapack. It took some work, but we managed to convince the management that it was worth investing the time and effort to produce datapacks that were complete and looked really professional. At the time, we were on Altium Read Article

How to Use Blind and Buried Vias in Altium Designer

How to Use Blind and Buried Vias in Altium Designer The old adage of not being able to cram 10 pounds of whatever into a 5 pound bag is especially true when it comes to routing traces on a PCB design. Unfortunately this demand seems to be the norm anymore; everyone these days wants to increase the density of designs or reduce their form factor, or both! One way that you can help yourself is to use blind and buried vias when routing. These vias will open up a host of new routing options as you will Read Article

The Electronics Standards Landscape for Self-Driving Cars

The Automotive Standards for Electronics: The Landscape of Self-Driving Cars Personally, I enjoy driving my own vehicle, and I am unsure of how comfortable I would feel about the process being fully automated. I like the idea of being able to take control over my vehicle when I need to, but it would be nice to be able to recline in the back seat on a long road trip. The automotive industry hasn’t brought self-driving cars to this level just yet, but rest assured, this is envisioned to be a reality in the not-too-distant Read Article

50:48 PCB Component Placement Webinar Proper component placement is one of the most important aspects of PCB design. You need to familiarize yourself with the Watch Video

Printed Circuit Board Design Software that is Productive and Painless to Use

Printed Circuit Board Design Software that is Productive and Painless to Use When I was young, a new hospital was built in my community. It was easy to get to and provided a great service. Over the years however, the hospital has grown and added more clinics and services. To accommodate this growth the property has been drastically altered for the construction of buildings and parking lots. Now there are narrow driveways, reduced parking, and areas blocked off by cement barricades. If new equipment is being delivered as Read Article

Advanced Design Techniques with Altium Designer

Advanced Design Techniques with Altium Designer In this article, we’ll learn how to use Altium Designer^® to implement extra functionalities that are not available by default. We’ll discover a powerful aspect of Altium Designer that when mastered can bring your design skills to a higher level. In this article, we’ll discuss how to implement a script to perform design verification for you. We will learn: How to create rules to verify some design requirements. To verify those rules using a script Read Article