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PCB Design

Stubs On Transmission Lines—What Do They Do And How Do You Keep Them From Happening?

Stubs On Transmission Lines—What Do They Do And How Do You Keep Them From Happening? In other articles we have written PCB Design For Test Structures And Tests Performed, Part 2, and How to Control Switching Signals with Terminations for Best Signal Quality, we have described how to properly account for all the various factors that impact the design of high-speed signals. Within those topics, we’ve noted that stubs along a net may have an adverse effect on the quality of those signals. But, we have not thoroughly addressed stubs Read Article

The Evolution Of Automotive Electronics

The Evolution Of Automotive Electronics Design The number, functionality, and complexity of today’s automotive electronics has grown beyond leaps and bounds over the past several years. Certainly, the flagship of this technology is the Tesla automobile. But, even for those of us who can’t afford a Tesla, there is an increasingly widespread utilization of this technology in mid-range and even lower-end new cars. This article will describe the design environment represented by this technology Read Article

The Fundamentals of High Speed SerDes Design

The Fundamentals of High Speed SerDes Design High speed SerDes design goes far beyond computer peripherals The challenges in high speed SerDes design filter right down to the PCB level and are all about backplane/daughtercard design, transmission line layout, selecting proper equalization schemes, and much more. This even gets down to the fundamentals, where stackup and power integrity become critical when driving transmitters and receiver ICs. If you’re designing a PCB as part of a SerDes Read Article

Some Pre-layout Power Spectrum Analysis Tips in Altium Designer

Some Pre-layout Power Spectrum Analyzer PCB Tips in Altium Designer Take advantage of your simulation tools before test and measurement. Here I want to expand a bit on the power spectrum analysis features in Altium Designer^®. In a previous post, we looked at working with simulations involving a frequency modulated signal fed into a nonlinear component (an NPN transistor). In this simulation, we ended with the Fourier spectrum at the load resistor for various values of base voltage/current. In the time-domain Read Article

DDR5 PCB Design and Signal Integrity: What Designers Need to Know

DDR5 PCB Layout, Routing, and Signal Integrity Guidelines Release of the DDR5 standard was announced in July 2020, about 18 months after the announced development of the first RAM module following the proposed standard. The standard allows peak speeds in excess of 5200 MT/sec/pin (compare that to 3200 MT/sec/pin with DDR4), with JEDEC-rated speeds up to 6400 MT/sec/pin and channel bandwidth increased up to 300 GB/s. Demand for this new generation of memories with 8, 16, and 32 GB capacities should Read Article

Linux and Android: What’s the Difference

Linux and Android: What’s the Difference When purchasing an off-the-shelf module or designing a customized module of your own using a design tool like Upverter (previously known as Geppetto), you have to select an operating system. Often, you have a variety of choices. Two popular open source software (OSS) platforms are Linux and Android. If you’re new to design, how do you know which one you want to use? There are complicated, highly technical answers to this question. However, if you Read Article

Open Source Software - A Moving Target

Open Source Software - A Moving Target Open Source Software (OSS) is an attractive alternative to proprietary software platforms. There’s a lot to love about OSS. Lower cost is a primary decision driver for many companies. Others want to enjoy the freedom and flexibility to modify the software to their particular application requirements. Some companies don’t want to be at the mercy of the direction—or lack of direction—of proprietary software roadmaps. There’s also a lot to fret over Read Article

Wearable AI Voice Recorder Is Shipping

Crowdsourced Voice Recordings: A Wearable AI Voice Recorder Is Shipping Use a Senstone and never miss a flash of creative genius again (Image source: Senstone.com) Were you ever a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG)? If so, you may recall that the Starfleet officers and enlisted personnel wear small communicator badges on their left breast. These devices are presented in the shape of the Starfleet insignia and are activated with a light tap. They also incorporate a universal translator, which comes in handy Read Article

OnTrack Newsletter: Cloud-based Design, RF and Design Tips

OnTrack Newsletter: Cloud-based Design, RF and Design Tips OnTrack Newsletter December 2019 Vol. 3 No. 7 Altium 365: The New Frontier of Collaborative Cloud-Enabled Electronics Realization In this interview, we talk with Leigh Gawne, Chief Software Architect at Altium, to learn about Altium 365 and the impact he foresees that Cloud-enabled electronics realization will have on design engineers and the entire industry. (To see Leigh Gawne and team collaboratively design a board LIVE in Altium 365 at this Read Article

Isolated USB Connection Project

Isolated USB Connection Project While working heavily with microcontroller projects in the past, I learned that computer USB ports can be fragile things. Simply shorting dozens of volts across the port just kills them dead—and there are so many other creative ways to destroy USB functionality on a motherboard! I’ve seen USB isolation devices on the market which solve precisely these sorts of problems (developers doing bad with their devices), however, I never really got around Read Article

23:51 Intelligent Feedback Systems and Designing with Machine Learning in Mind Watch Video

SoC FPGA Boasts RISC-V Processor

SoC FPGA Boasts RISC-V Processor Well, the current "hot off the press" (don’t burn your fingers") news is that the folks at Microchip Technology have just unveiled the details regarding their forthcoming PolarFire SoC FPGA family boasting a hardened real-time, Linux-capable, RISC-V-based microprocessor subsystem. If you are "in the know," you should be jolly excited by now. On the other hand, there's so much going on these days that it's easy to let things fall through the Read Article

Optimizing Power Consumption

Power Consumption Optimization Power efficiency—energy efficiency if you’re a purist—has become perhaps the highest-profile aspect of system design. This is especially true for IoT applications where a device may need to operate for years on harvested energy or a cell battery. Thus, a critical stage of design is power optimization. Typically, the first stage of power optimization is setting the power budget. For example, the system spec might state that the device has to be Read Article

65W Single IC LED Driver Project

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 Read Article

Continuous Manufacturing

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 Read Article

PCB Bus Routing and Layout: The Basics

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 Read Article

High Speed Routing Guidelines for Advanced PCBs

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 Read Article