PCB Design Engineers

Pandemic PCB Prototyping: Building Electronics From Your Living Room

Pandemic PCB Prototyping: Building Electronics From Your Living Room It feels like everyone is writing an article these days about how they’re managing (or not managing) with stay-at-home orders due to COVID-19 restrictions. At the time of writing, California (where I am based) has the highest number of cases over any other state in the United States. To combat the pandemic, most non-essential businesses have been closed or open in a limited fashion. This means that folks who are able to work from home (e.g Read Article

Design data management system

The Search for the All-in-One Electronic Design Data Management System In this article we discuss the pain points of using a single design data management system over linking many together. Read Article

12V DC Uninterruptible Power Supply

12V DC Uninterruptible Power Supply I live in a rural village that tends to have intermittent power when there are high winds or storms. Because of this, my computers, servers, and network equipment are all on relatively low-cost, uninterruptible power supplies. These all run on sealed lead acid batteries and are not an overly efficient way to power a DC device such as a Raspberry Pi or internet router as the incoming mains. AC charges a DC battery, which then creates AC power Read Article

31:31 Transmission Line Impedance Calculation With Altium Designer Today’s PCBs contain many transmission lines. Combine this with increased clock frequencies and data rates and the result is a critical challenge to high-speed design. Neglecting these dynamics can undermine product development by compromising performance, power consumption, EMC/EMI compliance, and more - leading to delayed design cycles and opening gaps that can be exploited by your competition. Hone your high-speed design skills by joining us as we discuss the typical transmission lines encountered in today’s designs, the PCB variables that affect impedance, as well as how to create, calculate, and design transmission lines in Altium Designer. Learn how to maximize the built in SIMBEOR® engine by Simberian to craft impedance profiles and manage transmission lines in your designs. This Live Webinar recording covers the following: Current trends in electronics development PCB transmission line model and impedance calculations Transmission line with specified impedance in Altium Designer Don’t pass up on this opportunity to experience the industry’s best in class design experience! Watch Video

Never Cross a Ground Plane Gap in High Speed PCB Design

Never Cross a Ground Plane Gap in High Speed PCB Design I often browse electronics and PCB forums, and I see the same question asked over and over: Why shouldn’t I route a trace over a split in my ground plane? This question gets asked by everyone from makers to professional designers who are just dipping their toes into high speed PCB design. For the professional signal integrity engineer, the answer should be obvious. Whether you’re a long-time PCB layout engineer or a casual designer, it helps to Read Article

The Value of Rapid PCB Prototyping

The Value of Rapid PCB Prototyping Raspberry Pi, Arduino, off-the-shelf “maker” boards, and custom PCBs all play a part in rapid PCB prototyping. Read Article

Comparing Static and Dynamic Flex PCB Design: Mechanical Considerations

Comparing Static and Dynamic Flex Design: Rigid Flex PCB Bend Radius and other Mechanical Considerations Static and dynamic flex PCB design is as much mechanical as it is electrical. Here are some design tips for both types of PCBs. Read Article

Selecting FR4 Alternative Materials for Multilayer PCB Substrates

Selecting FR4 Alternatives of PCB Substrate Materials for Multilayer Boards You don’t have to settle for FR4 for your next multilayer PCB. Read more on selecting other PCB substrate materials. Read Article

Solving Modern PCB Layout Challenges

Solving Modern PCB Layout Challenges PCB technology advances are a two-edged sword. They have increased the power and applicability of electronics. But they also make PCB layout more difficult, raising the risk of longer time-to-market cycles and higher product costs. Designers can mitigate these risks by using a unified PCB layout software package that provides the automation necessary to bring products to market quickly and on-budget. INTRODUCTION “Honey, I shrunk the kids.” “It’s Read Article

Impedance Controlled Routing for Boards Made in Altium Designer

Impedance Controlled Routing for Boards Made in Altium Designer The 3D field solver in Altium Designer makes impedance controlled routing easy and lets you create design rules for your system. Read Article

Get to Know Microvia Manufacturing Processes and HDI Substrates

Get to Know Microvia Manufacturing Processes and HDI Substrates Initial HDI Fabrication High Density Interconnect printed circuits actually started in 1980, when researchers started investigating ways to reduce the size of vias. The first innovator is not known, but some of the earliest pioneers include Larry Burgess of MicroPak Laboratories (developer of LaserVia), Dr. Charles Bauer at Tektronix (who produced photodielectric vias), [1] and Dr. Walter Schmidt at Contraves (who developed plasma-etched vias) Read Article

From Mechanical Drilling to Laser Drilling of Microvias

From Mechanical Drilling to Laser Drilling of PCB Microvias Miniaturization of PCB designs eventually forces a switch from mechanical drilling to laser drilling. Learn more about sizing vias for your next multilayer PCB. Read Article

Fly-by topology for DDR3 vs DDR4 RAM

Fly-by Topology for DDR3 and DDR4 Memory: Routing Guidelines Banner image credit: Nine Dot Connects Take a look at your RAM chips the next time you're upgrading your desktop or laptop. If you need to, get the chip under a magnifying glass. Any traces you might see on the surface layer are just the beginning of a complicated web of traces between the edge connector and the RAM chips. Although the routing can get quite complicated, you can see a relatively simple topology when you take a 30,000 foot view of Read Article

PCB Impedance Calculation and Cross Section Features in PCB Layout

PCB Impedance Calculation and Cross Section Features in PCB Layout When I first started laying out printed circuit boards, there wasn’t a lot of concern about controlled impedance routing. At that time, most everything was low speed and we were using larger traces and thru-hole vias for the simple four layer boards. That all changes once a board grows in speed, and changes demanded that we become more involved with the layer stackup design and specifying trace widths. At first we relied on board constraint Read Article

Select the Right Microvia Aspect Ratio in Your HDI PCB

Select the Right Microvia Aspect Ratio in Your HDI PCB If you’re not familiar with PCB design or electronics in general, you probably wonder how newer electronics can pack so much functionality into progressively smaller devices. It takes more than just Moore’s Law, it takes creative PCB design methods to pack all that functionality into a single device. This gave birth to HDI design for densely packed circuit boards and small electronics, like smartphones and small form factor embedded systems. Vias Read Article

Termination Methods in High Speed and High Frequency PCBs

Termination Methods in High Speed and High Frequency PCBs The topic of termination will inevitably come up when dealing with high-speed digital systems. Most digital systems have at least one standardized high-speed interface, or possibly fast GPIOs that produce fast edge rate signals. Advanced systems will have many standardized interfaces which also have termination applied, normally on the semiconductor die. If you determine that you actually need termination, what method should be used? As it turns Read Article

Laser-drilled Via-in-pad Technology in Your PCB

Laser-Drilled Microvia-in-Pad Technology in Your HDI PCB HDI PCBs with fine-pitch BGAs often use laser-drilled via-in-pad or microvia in-pad for BGA fanout routing. Here is how to design microvia-in-pad. Read Article