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1:39
How Did the Guest Lecture Series Get Started at MTU?
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1:21
What Topics Have Been Discussed in MTU's Guest Lecture Series?
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1:25
How Are Millenial Students Different From Previous Generations?
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50
Does Your Industrial Background Help You as a Teacher?
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1:35
How Do Students Respond To The Hands-On Program?
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Top Issues in PCB Data Management Systems and Processes
PCB Data Management is a journey with no final destination. On this journey, significant issues can and often pop up. If you decide to ignore them, they can worsen and ultimately lead to completely ruining your PCB data management systems and processes. In this blog, we will look at several of these issues. I prefer to call them pitfalls because they can appear suddenly, and you can easily fall into them if you’re not careful. But, if you are
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Warning Signs You Need PCB Data Management
I get a gut-wrenching feeling when people are doing PCB Design and ignoring all the warning signs around them. It’s like in the movies. I enjoy watching horror movies, but too many times I find them more funny and predictable than scary. Why is it every time the “bad guy” starts to chase the unfortunate helpless victim, their automatic response is to run to the top floor of the building? Everyone is shocked when the person meets their “unseen”
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Designing Your Circuit Board for Boundary Scan PCB Testing
You can avoid some manual circuit tests with a boundary scan test On simple boards with few components and surface-level traces, you can probably test all aspects of your board by hand without much difficulty. Imagine you needed to do this with a multilayer PCB, and you’ll see that there are many aspects of a manufactured and assembled board that cannot be tested by hand. With more advanced boards, where traces are embedded in the interior layers
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PCB EMI/EMC Guidelines: Meeting EMI/EMC Standards in Your Designs
What if you set two cell phones next to each other and suddenly neither of them worked properly? Thankfully, this doesn’t happen because designers and manufacturers made serious efforts to ensure these devices comply with EMC standards on conducted and radiated EMI. Any device should comply with EMC standards before it makes it to the marketplace. While this sounds complicated, you have a number of simple design strategies to help your next
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Kramer-Kronig’s Relationship to PCBs
The Kramer Kronig relationship is basically a way to go back and forth from the real and imaginary parts of a function. That’s it. So when someone says “blah blah blah must conform to the Kramer-Kronig relationship”, it’s a statement that is stating the obvious. Similar statements are, dogs must be part of the canine family and thus canis genus or petrol must have come from petroleum deposit on earth. Both correct and mildly interesting
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Long Range WiFi for Remote Sensors and Connectivity
If you need to have network access from sensors which need more than a little bandwidth, cellular can get quite expensive. There are quite a few long-range wireless systems that are targeted towards sensors, however, trade bandwidth for range. If you need to stream video, send pictures, or have a constant stream of data from a range of sensors these wireless links might not be suitable. WiFi has rather limited range by comparison but does have
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Requirements Management and Quality Functional Deployment
“Ending up in the wrong place is the result of bad directions, not bad driving. Product failure in the marketplace results from errors in requirements, not implementation.” - Thomas L. Musto, Chairman, IBM Corporation (Retired) A definition of QFD: Quality-Functional-Deployment (QFD) [literal translation of the Japanese characters] is an analytical method to help you transform customer needs (the voice of the customer [VOC]) into engineering
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Changing PCB Reference Planes During Routing in Multilayer Boards
Vias with annular rings for reaching an interior PCB layer If you’re a new designer and you take a look at some boards in common electronic products, you may not even realize they are multilayer boards unless you know exactly where to look. The fact is that more complex devices simply do not allow every single trace to be placed on a surface layer, thus signals must be routed within an interior layer in order to make the desired connections. With
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Why Doesn’t Every Application Use Rigid Flex Technology?
Why Doesn’t Every Application Use Rigid Flex Technology? Good Question! Rigid-flex technology is a hybrid between rigid boards and flexible circuits,m combing the most favorable aspects of both. The flexible portion helps solve space, weight, and packaging issues because it can bend, fold, and flex in either installation (flex to install) or end use (dynamic flex). The rigid portion supports dense component areas, allowing higher layer counts
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PCB FR-4 Materials Are Not All The Same
In the PCB industry, “FR-4”.is a common designation for laminate materials. To a certain extent, FR-4 as a specific type of laminate is one of the many myths promulgated throughout the industry. This blog will address the history the term FR-4, what it really means, the various quantifiers associated with it, and the characteristic issues of concern when selecting design-specific laminates. The Origins of FR-4 If you research FR-4 as a term
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Scope Your PCB Design Data Management System for Success
One of my favorite quotes from Zig Ziglar is “Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.” I like that - doing the best we can with what we have. I’d also add that to be successful with anything, we need realistic expectations and an understanding of precisely what
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2:41
What Things in a Board Can Contribute to Sticker Shock?
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