Power Integrity

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Don’t Just Resolve Your New Year, (PCB) Design It History contains many valuable lessons to learn, but this is the time of year when many people consider the future. You deserve some congratulations for going through your 2017: you learned new designs, tackled challenges, and did everything in your power to make 2017 your most successful year yet. The only thing left for 2018 is reaching higher and accomplishing even more. Don’t let yesteryear’s success limit your current ambition; keep pushing Read Article

Order Up! Finding Your Chef Voice in Mixed Voltage PCB Design I was watching a cooking program on television the other day when I noticed how chefs always seem to be yelling whenever they need something or are demanding another kitchen staff to do something. It started to dawn on me how much of a mixture a kitchen has to be: there have to be all sorts of people who are both capable of being quiet and listening, and being loud and giving orders when something needs to get done. When you stop to consider all Read Article

Backroads or Highway: Managing PCB Power Distribution with a PDN Analyzer Who hasn’t been caught daydreaming out the window, overlooking the lines of cars on the freeway at a standstill, wondering about easier or more effective ways of getting to your job on time? And even then, sometimes the alternate routes aren’t always the fastest—there could be road construction, or an event going on which makes you have to re-route even more. At that point, most tend to throw all hopes for getting to work on time out the window Read Article

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

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

Take Your Shoes Off: Modular Design Tips for Obsolescence Management I’ve noticed that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who have a large armoire full of lightly-used shoes to choose from for their daily activities, and those who have a few (too) well-worn pairs of shoes that they are squeaking out until the toe-holes become intolerable. I am among the latter, and unfortunately for my current pair of sneakers - it is getting time to replace them. But there’s always a golden-period to replace old Read Article

Give Them No Quarter: Preventing PIC Microcontroller Code from Being Duplicated Copying, from all understandings, seems like a disingenuous and sub-par strategy for any solution you need; from taking a test in school, to catching up with your friends, it is rare to find a moment where you would be rewarded for simply copying a message or answer. Imitating, on the other hand, is an encouraged practice in most professional industries - follow the guidelines and roadwork laid out before you so as to avoid the tedious work of Read Article

Design Tips For Incorporating GSM Modules into an Embedded System As loving and rewarding as a family is, sometimes they can be a pain. My aunt, for example, refuses to communicate with my grandfather. They live less than thirty minutes apart; however, refuse to see each other. This makes coordinating visiting my family unnecessarily difficult as, often, I need to make separate day plans in order to see each so-to-speak faction. But what’s most stressful, is that often it leaves the middleman communication role Read Article

Understanding Solder Bridge Shorts: Bake Your Cookie and Eat It Too I love the idea of baking. Especially around the holidays, there’s something thrilling and therapeutic in planning to bake up elaborate platters of cookies and bring them to parties. In reality, what I like is to eat cookie dough. The actual rolling or spooning out cookies onto a pan and waiting for them to bake is an exercise in both tedium and restraint. When I lose my patience, I try to cram as many cookies onto the tray as possible; of course Read Article

Paint by Numbers: Solder Paste Stencil Design Guidelines To Reduce Shortages I’ve never had much artistic talent, but when I was a kid I loved those paint-by-numbers kits. Up until I saw those I’d only used watercolors, but I was enthralled with the thick, slow flow of the paint. I may also have killed some brain cells from breathing all the fumes. I was completely obsessed with keeping the paint in the lines, so I didn’t use the brush they gave you. Instead, I traced the outlines with a toothpick that had barely been Read Article

Is It Hot In Here Or Is That Your PCB Shorting - Common Causes of Shortages As an undergrad, I once had classes cancelled because of an electrical fire in a neighboring building. Even funnier was that I was actually in a junior-level electrical engineering course when we were dismissed. Several students wanted to go check the fire out; their reasoning was that we were electrical engineers, and thus electrical fires fell under our purview. In this class we’d had quite a few labs ending with blue smoke (and even one small Read Article

PCB Design for Manufacturing Guidelines: How to Avoid Critical Design Mistakes I swear I would have been on the journey to be the next MasterChef if I had not completed my engineering degree. Not because I’m terrifically good at cooking, but because I didn’t give up after a horrifying attempt to cook fried rice vermicelli. Failing to soak those long threads of noodles resulted in pasta with a hard wire texture that was beyond salvageable. This was a good example of what can happen to a dish when you don’t follow directions Read Article

10 Symptoms of a Bad PDN At face value, DC power integrity seems to be a simple enough topic -- you just need to make sure that every component on your PCB has the power (current and voltage) it needs when it needs it. But that’s just on the surface. TOPICS IN THIS SOLUTION What is power integrity? What’s the problem? Symptoms WHAT IS POWER INTEGRITY? The new reality is a bit more complicated. When you start to work with fine-pitch device packages, the manufacturing Download PDF

Why You Should Incorporate Digital Input Sampling in Your Embedded System I particularly enjoy shopping in the supermarket on the weekend. In the grocery section, there are samples of various food products that range from tuna spread to white coffee. While I enjoy hopping from one sample stations to another, my 5 years old son shamelessly always asks for a second helping. In electronics, sampling carries a different meaning than leisurely eating a variety of snacks. In an embedded system, digital input signals play an Read Article

PCB Design Guidelines for Designing Solar Powered Embedded Systems: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: PCB Design Guidelines For Designing Solar Powered Embedded Systems. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you Read Article

High Voltage PCB Design Tips: Materials for High Voltage PCBs Along with designing electrical hardware and running for stress management, I’m an avid knitter. My grandmother taught me when I was in grade school, and I’ve taught a dozen or so people along the way. Before you can get to the fun part of actually knitting something, you have to select a yarn. Is it for a newborn? Then I want it to be soft, but also machine washable so the mom can actually use it without worrying about handwashing. Does it Read Article

PCB Design Guidelines for Designing Solar Powered Embedded Systems Have you ever gone on a vacation and felt like you needed another one immediately after? I sure do, my last beach holiday was completely ruined by constant thunderstorms. Unpredictable weather always is always a dilemma when I’m planning ahead for my next vacation, especially if it involves outdoor activities. I take the same cautious approach when I’m designing solar-powered embedded systems intended for outdoor applications. It is a totally Read Article