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PCB Design
65W Single IC LED Driver Project
One of the projects I’m working on for personal use at the moment is a high color rendering index (CRI) LED panel, which I’m aiming to make about 300W. I was exploring options for making a high-performance LED driver pcb that would be quite compact, and while I couldn’t build a 300W single IC LED driver, I was able to design a 65W one that didn’t look like it would melt right through the circuit board. See more Altium Projects or read more by
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Continuous Manufacturing
Volume As a manufacturing term, it can mean different things, depending upon the industry. Volume production for an automotive OEM means hundreds of thousands of units. For an industrial CNC manufacturer, lifetime sales over decades might be in the tens of thousands. For many small design companies, producing even “low” volumes may be a manufacturing challenge. It takes success to be able to invest in infrastructure that supports higher volumes
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PCB Bus Routing and Layout: The Basics
Power supply on a network switch Modern computing simply wouldn’t be possible without PCB bus routing and layout. The same goes for many digital systems that manipulate data in parallel. If you’re working on a new PCB design and you need to route a bus between different devices, there are some simple rules to follow to ensure your signals aren’t distorted and that successive devices are triggered correctly. As some designers may question the
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High Speed Routing Guidelines for Advanced PCBs
You can create this advanced board with these high speed routing guidelines for advanced PCBs Newer designs are continuing to get faster, with PCIe 5.0 reaching 32 Gb/s, and PAM4 pushing signal integrity and speeds to the limit. Proper interconnect design must account for the lower noise margins of advanced devices, impeccable power stability requirements, and much more to ensure signals can be received properly. With advanced devices running at
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MIPI Physical Layer Routing and Signal Integrity
MIPI physical layer routing (C-PHY) is typically used to connect these smartphone cameras to a processor. When most designers talk about routing standards, particularly for advanced devices, they typically refer to differential routing standards (e.g., LVDS) that enable high data rates. These signaling standards have proliferated computers, networking equipment, smart electronics, and other areas, and they have been critical for operating with
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Leveraging Existing Components Data to Build Better Design’s Faster
Altium Concord Pro
™
as a standalone product and brand name has been discontinued and the capabilities are now available as part of our Altium enterprise solutions. Learn more here . In the business of robust electronics design, it’s not enough to build something that works, or even something that works well. Working phenomenally is the bare minimum in a competitive landscape. A robust design at a holistic level is one that is made of the correct
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Webinar on XR | Think AR on Steroids
Making the business case for XR (Image source: XR Intelligence) Do you remember when the internet first reached the popular consciousness with the release of the MOSAIC web browser circa 1993? A couple of years later, even though almost everyone was aware of the internet by that time, many companies -- including large, multibillion-dollar concerns -- were still debating internally whether it was worth spending their time and resources on having
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8-Bit Micros are Alive and Kicking in Nucleo-8s207k8 Boards
The NUCLEO-8S207K8 board boasts a 32-pin STM8S207K8 MCU (Image source: STMicroelectronics) I just heard from the guys and gals at STMicroelectronics (ST) that they are "making design starts using 8-bit STM8 microcontrollers (MCUs) faster, more affordable, and more accessible for creative minds of all types by introducing new development boards in the easy-to-use Nucleo-32 form factor." We will return to consider these little rascals in a moment
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EMI from Capacitor Heatsinks and What You Can Do About It
Selecting the right heatsink can help you keep your system cool and prevent EMI . While it may not be obvious, or while most designers may not think to check, heatsinks can generate EMI when they are connected to a switching element. This is a common problem in power supply design, and whenever a heatsink is placed in contact with a component that switches with high current draw at high frequency. Reducing EMI from heatsinks requires balancing
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Some Techniques for Suppressing DC-DC Converter EMI in IoT Products
This Li ion battery is most likely connected to a switching regulator to provide stable power. Suppressing EMI susceptibility in IoT devices from various sources is critical to ensuring your new product will work as designed. Similarly, your IoT product should limit spurious emissions if you want it to comply with EMC regulations. Among the various sources of radiated EMI from your next product, EMI within the device itself should also be
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Load Line Analysis for Nonlinear Circuits in Altium Designer
If you’re in the business of analog circuit design, then you’ll likely need to run simulations of your system to determine its functionality. Linear systems are rather intuitive, even in the case where strong feedback becomes an important determinant of stability. With nonlinear circuits, this can get more complicated, and it’s not always easy to see how the system operates unless you have some experience with similar systems. Transistors and
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A Retro-Computing Christmas
Sinclair 48K ZX Spectrum computer (1982) (Image source: Bill Bertram/Wikipedia) It's starting to look a lot like (a retro-computing) Christmas. I understand why many younger readers cannot imagine a world before today's incredibly powerful computing and gaming systems with their high-resolution graphics subsystems. We all enjoy these systems, but those of us who are more... let's say "seasoned"… remember the raw excitement we felt just to own any
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Splitting Planes—The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
Splitting planes or making plane cuts is another one of those technical issues wherein there is a lot of conflicting information. Some say it’s a good thing to split power planes; others say you can split ground planes and power planes both, some say you make cuts only in power planes, and others say to avoid plane cuts altogether. This article will debunk the myths surrounding split planes, provide evidence as to when they are useful, and
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Non-functional pads—what are they and what problems can they create?
In previous articles on my blog , I have stated that non-functional pads should always be removed from PCB artwork, but I have not gone into detail as to why this should be the case. In the industry at large, there is some confusion about these pads and whether or not they serve a useful purpose. In this article, I will define what they are, how their use originated, the problems they can create and why they should be removed from PCB artwork
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Geeky Holiday Gift Ideas
The holiday season is coming! I asked both the Altium community and my Altium Library community what geek gifts they are looking for, and I’ve added some of my own for the first ever Altium Geek Gift Guide! This is mostly for electronics geeks, but there should be something for everyone! There are so many amazing geek gifts out there it would be impossible to cover them all, so I’ve tried to keep to community suggestions. I then added just a few
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Calculating Your Fabrication Capability Coefficients
People have long asked me, “How do you know if a fabricator is capable of manufacturing my boards?” First, I tell them to ask for an IPC PCQR2 Report. If that is not available and there is no time or money to go through the process, then calculating the Fabrication Capability Coefficient is a good ‘second-best’. Fabrication Yields The Fabrication Capability Coefficient (FCC) is computed from a fabricator’s electrical test data, their First Pass
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High Performance Sub 1GHz RF Project
This week, I’m building a high-performance sub-1GHz transceiver that I want to use as a standalone Internet of Things node using the ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller. As with my other projects , this project is open source and published on GitHub for you to use as the basis of your own design, or to use as-is. The RF schematic and layout are production proven, as are the microcontroller schematic and all footprints on the board. However, do keep in
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