PCB Design

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Don’t Get Caught Sleeping: Resolve PCB Power Distribution Problems I’ve got a heating problem at the moment—after 30 years of service to the various owners of this house, my furnace is finally throwing in the towel and no longer providing heat. Unfortunately, this has come at a, let’s say, inopportune time with it hovering just under freezing lately, and with nights being even more frigid. We installed an ad hoc heating system comprised of the gas fireplace and several space heaters; however, this is not a long Read Article

Hide and Seek: Key Serial-Number Chips for PIC Microcontroller Code Protection One of my favorite games, when I was young, was hide and seek. I would play with my friends and it was always fun to try and find a good hiding place. As an older brother, I played the same game with my younger brothers, but with a twist. Instead of hiding myself, I had to hide my stuff from them. If I picked good hiding places, my stuff was safe. However, if I was lackadaisical and chose poor hiding places they were sure to find my toys or Read Article

Completing a Pre-Layout Design Checklist Can Keep Your PCB Design from Crashing Many years ago I got my private pilot’s license, and there is nothing that I love better than being behind the controls of a small plane. When the plane leaps off the runway and into the sky, the feeling is exhilarating. Then, after executing a perfectly smooth landing, there is a sense of triumphant success. In addition to the pure joy of flying, there are also many ideas and lessons that I have taken from my time in the air. One of these has Read Article

Don't Let Lithography Issues Cast a Shadow on Your PCB Manufacturing Projectors can often be the most annoying piece of technology to work with. You could have a movie night you want to host with an old school projector and some nice, buttery popcorn but be unable to find a spot where the image projected isn’t crooked; you could be trying to give a highly-influential presentation to your peers and bosses, only to encounter that the projector has squished all of your images and graphs; you could be trying to teach Read Article

Boats With The Current: Microstrip and Stripline Transmission Line Trade-offs In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick Carraway, is torn between infiltrating the notorious elite social circles by attending his neighbor Jay Gatsby’s infamous mansion parties in Long Island, New York and establishing himself on the east coast in a finance career. It can be easy to have an understanding of The Great Gatsby through its context - the roaring twenties, flappers, prohibition - it wouldn’t do justice to any of Read Article

The Best Methods of Calculations for Pad Size in PCB Design In our family we have a phrase that we use to describe when a person is surprised, we call it a “Spielberg moment.” Think back to movies like Poltergeist, or Close Encounters, where the characters in the movie would stare with their mouths hanging open at something that was surprising, shocking, or horrifying. This is what I mean by Spielberg moment. The other day while teaching her third graders, my wife gave the kids a Spielberg moment when she Read Article

Old Wisdom: Best Schematic Software Simplifies Schematic to PCB Synchronizing You’ve heard it said: “there’s no school like the old school.” Is that always true though? When I was a kid my “old school” taught me to type on a typewriter, not a word processor. If I was using that old school typewriter today, it would take me significantly longer to write this article. I wouldn’t have access to spell checking or any of the other helpful utilities that I’ve become accustomed to. I wouldn’t be able to easily backspace and re Read Article

No, I Don’t Want to Make a U-turn: Guidelines for PCB Trace Routing Watching your old town grow up can be a lot like watching your favorite television shows ending, or watching a sequel years after a good movie was released. The town I grew up in was laid out on a grid with streets so wide you didn’t even have to parallel park downtown. It was a town so small that traffic jams were caused by two people in different cars stopping to talk more often than accidents. When I go back to visit, the town has grown; the Read Article

Forget Parking Frustrations with Capacitive Touch Sensing Keypad Design Sometimes it feels like the parking ticket machines are neglected intentionally to incur more parking tickets from people incapable or unwilling to wait for the machine to function enough to give them their ticket stub. I’ve had my fair share of frustration when coming across one with malfunctioning buttons on its keypad, forcing me to hunt the surrounding area for a machine which actually is working. Finding parking is hard enough in many cities Read Article

What Is a Gerber File in the PCB Fabrication Process? Aside from the food, the sweaters, and the cheer, what is the most important part of a holiday party? Taking pictures, of course! So when I was getting ready for a holiday party, I retrieved my HD camera to get some better quality shots than what my phone might be able to give me. Though as I pulled the camera out, I realized just how long it’s been since I’ve used it. And just like any technology that you don’t use for a while, I had completely Read Article

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

Preventing Critical PCB Contamination: There Goes the Boom Ensuring chemical compatibility isn’t always as straightforward as avoiding throwing oil on a fire. When I was an undergrad, I worked in a lab with a heavy emphasis on etching. Processing steps use a range of chemicals, and sometimes these chemicals would not be compatible. One day, a student coworker of mine was hearing weird sounds while etching. After a few minutes, he pulled the fume hood shut and encountered a small explosion from Read Article

Design for Electromagnetic Compatibility in PCB: Let Your Revels Never End What if William Shakespeare worked as an electrical engineer instead of a poet and playwright? If electronics existed during the mid-to-late sixteenth century, the Bard may have studied the impact of electromagnetic interference (EMI) on circuits and the need for electromagnetic compatibility (EMC). After all, he wrote about his fascination with noise in The Tempest: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give Read Article

Drones, Robots and Thermal Management: OnTrack Newsletter December 2017 On Track Newsletter December 2017 VOL. 1 No 9 Welcome to the December issue of Altium Designer’s On Track Newsletter. In celebration of our far reaching global community, we are shining the spotlight on an impressive PCB designer from Norway this month. Tor-Anders Lunder designs boards for a startup company called Staaker which makes a tracking drone with a camera mount for sports enthusiasts. In Maker Space, we highlight a group of Brazilian Read Article

What Does it Take to be a PCB Layout Designer? In the movie “Men of Honor,” Robert De Niro portrayed Billy Sunday, a Navy diving instructor with a challenging pedagogical method. He motivated his student divers by describing how hard their job would be to prepare them for the difficulties of their tasks. He concluded his speech by saying, “I don’t know why anybody would want to be a Navy Diver.” His honesty, in this case, wasn’t intended to be demotivating—sometimes a job takes a certain type Read Article

Internet of Things Security Vulnerabilities: It's All About Buffer Overflow I follow a bunch of animal and nature publications, and recently the phrase ‘zombie ants,’ kept popping up in my feed. I decided to do a little digging and discovered that there’s a type of fungi - Ophiocordyceps - whose life cycle involves infecting ants that walk across its spores with fungal cells that infiltrate the ant’s central nervous system and essentially take over the ant. Once they have the ant "under its control", the fungus-infected Read Article

Azevedo the ITAndroids: Humanoid Robot Soccer Team Judy Warner: How long has the ITAndroids team been in existence, and how did it get started? Arthur Azevedo: The ITAndroids team was created in 2005 by Jackson Matsura. Back then he was a masters student, now he is a professor in the electronics department. Two undergraduate students and another master’s student joined the team. They won the Latin America RoboCup (LARC) 2D Soccer Simulation that year. They quickly became one of the Latin American Read Article