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Top Tips for Flex Designers from a Fabrication Perspective

Top Tips for Flex Designers from a Fabrication Perspective Sometimes, it can seem like designers and fabricators are speaking two different languages, and maybe they are! But both are working toward the common goal of producing a high quality, reliable, and repeatable printed circuit board. “Back in the old days,” it was common for designers and fabricators to meet face-to-face on a regular basis. Designers became familiar with and understood the basic fabrication processes, including where different Read Article

Why Your Root Cause Analysis Starts with Component Traceability

Why Your Root Cause Analysis Starts with Component Traceability At this point, we’ve reached a significant milestone. Having followed through with the last article, we now have a very stable and, more importantly, reliable PCB library. Since we can safely use the data in designs, many people decide not to go beyond the review process. You should, however, continue to the fifth pillar if you want to ensure success. So, why the fifth pillar? Because although we have a great structure, we must take the Read Article

First Prize Winner at Intel International Science and Engineering Fair

First Prize Winner at Intel International Science and Engineering Fair My name is Piotr Lazarek, and I’m a second year student at the “Filomata” secondary school in Gliwice. Since 2017 I have been engaged in developing new technologies within the sector of precision agriculture, and for my most recent project I worked on the creation of an autonomous vehicle which uses a replaceable ion-selective electrode system in order to measure concentrations of different elements inside soil. This work generates useful data Read Article

The Race to Hire Embedded Software Engineers in the Automotive Industry

Automotive Software Engineering: The Race to Hire Embedded Software Engineers Embedded software engineers will take a new place of prominence in the automotive industry The current economic climate in the US is humming along and has been primarily driven by growth in the tech sector. Everything from consumer electronics, SaaS, and advanced manufacturing are helping drive growth. The electronics portion of the automotive industry is not typically seen as sitting at the cutting edge of new technology, until you look to the Read Article

Design and Analysis of Chirped Automotive Radar Systems

Chirped Automotive Radar Sensor Systems Design and Analysis Thanks to the German inventor Christian Huelsmeyer, radar has been around since 1904, the year he patented his telemobiloscope. This simple radar device could detect ships up to 3000 m away and operated at wavelengths from 40-50 cm with a separate receiver antenna. The device could only be used to determine the presence of a distant object, but later versions could be used to calculate range. Today’s semi-autonomous vehicles, and upcoming fully Read Article

Damping and Reflection Transfer with a Series Termination Resistor

Damping and Reflection Transfer with a Series Termination Resistor Trace, source, and load impedance matching are important in boards that contain transmission lines. To reach these conditions, you may see some designs that use a series termination resistor on single-ended transmission lines. The reasoning for doing this is sometimes to slow down a signal, or sometimes to set the driver's output impedance, depending who you ask. As surprising as it might be, the placement of series resistors for termination are Read Article

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High Density Interconnects

High Density Interconnects - A Design and Manufacturing Guidebook A compilation of Happy Holden's expert advice on high density interconnect design, routing, layout, and manufacturing for HDI PCBs. Read Article

PCB Design Rule Verification in Agile Development

Rules Verification in Agile PCB Design and Development Agile development relies on a unique workflow that can benefit from PCB design rule verification I used to think that agile development is just a software development methodology with specific rules and processes. Agile hardware design processes seem to be rigid when viewed from the surface, but any agile design process is designed to allow a team to adapt to change throughout the product development cycle. In reality, the central ideas in agile Read Article

Backplane bus and connector arrangement

Signal Integrity Simulations for Backplane Bus and Connectors Modern embedded computing systems that interconnect a large number of modules in a single enclosure will probably need a backplane, and the buses connecting these systems run at multi-Gbps data rates. The connectors, PCB, and interfaces in total contribute to losses throughout the bus, and a system-level simulation will need to account for all of these elements to ensure a working design. As part of a design and verification flow, simulations are Read Article

Backplane Routing Topology

Backplane Routing Topology for Gigabit Copper and Fiber Networks Backplanes are the backbone of modular computing platforms, providing a fabric that interlinks pluggable daughtercards in a single system. The design of backplanes must support interfaces on the daughtercards, often at high data rates reaching multiple Gbps. Some standards also specify system design requirements that support RF or fiber integration into these systems. The RF and fiber portion is normally integrated through a specialized connector Read Article

BOM Management and PCB Design Data Synchronization

BOM Management and PCB Design Data Synchronization Cloud-based tools for data management can keep your design and production data synchronized If you lead a design team, then your job is already difficult enough. Your design teams need to adhere to a development schedule and manage requirements changes as they create a new product. Collaboration is key in any environment with multiple players, and your design tools play an important role in creating a productive environment. Ensuring that all Read Article

Embedded Optical Interconnects in PCBs for Ultra High Speed Design

Embedded Optical Interconnects in PCBs for Ultra High Speed Design Most PCB designers—except those that work on optical transceivers—are probably not aware of the coming revolution in silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs), electronic-photonic integrated circuits (EPICs), and greater proliferation of embedded optical systems outside of telecom. Applications outside of telecom (for example, military and aerospace systems) that require massive data transfer rates already make use of fiber optics for embedded Read Article

Agile Product Lifecycle Management Methods in PCB Design

Agile Product Lifecycle Management Methods in PCB Design Supercharge your productivity with agile product lifecycle management Any industry that relies heavily on new technologies must frequently reinvent itself and address product obsolescence. Every piece of technology has a finite lifecycle that ends due to obsolescence or malfunction. Electronics and the PCBs that support them are no different; components on PCBs eventually wear out and malfunction, or the product can no longer compete with a Read Article

Landless Vias

Landless Vias One persistent myth is that PCB vias MUST have annular rings. I thought this for many years until our Japanese partners introduced us to landless vias. We said, “You can’t do that, the vias have to have lands!” They replied, “Try it out and test it?” So, we created a test vehicle and tested thousands of vias with various diameters against numerous annular ring vias. Guess what? They were right!! As the annular ring got smaller, the failures Read Article

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