Project Management

How Schematic Design Reuse Can Help Your Next PCB Schematic Layout

How Schematic Design Reuse Can Help Your Next PCB Schematic Layout In the town where I live there is this lady who is a magician with a sewing machine. She is in charge of the wardrobes for the high school musicals and is a whiz at taking costumes from old shows, and reusing them for new productions. Sometimes she alters the older costumes, and sometimes she simply uses them the way they already are. In the show this year, the evil queen is wearing a flamboyant dress that is actually an altered version of a Read Article

How Online BOM Management Helps Build Teamwork

How Online BOM Management Helps Build Teamwork Last week one of my co-workers, a brilliant guy named Phil, quit his job for a position in another company. Phil was amazing, and losing him was a tremendous blow to our department and the company. The tragic thing though is that Phil didn’t leave for a better job, he left because he felt that he no longer added any value. It is amazing at how many truly exemplary employees end up quitting because of workplace frustrations and feeling Read Article

PCB BOM Creation as a Living Document

PCB BOM Creation as a Living Document The other day my son bought himself a new phone because the navigator in his old phone was defective. Every time that he used the old phone for directions, he would end up getting lost. Although taking the time to get a new phone wasn’t in his plans, he could no longer afford wasting time trying to figure out where he was and where he needed to go next. His difficulties reminded me of the problems that I’ve seen in some PCB design groups where Read Article

Bill of Materials Inventory Management and the Benefits of an Online Parts Request System

Bill of Materials Inventory Management and the Benefits of an Online Parts Request Documentation Systems I once asked a family member to borrow some money to use as a down payment. His response included a counter-proposal that I didn’t understand, so I let it pass. Unfortunately by not understanding his answer to my request, I missed out on an even better opportunity than what I had initially asked for. That exchange has stayed in my mind as an example of how important clear communication is. In our world of PCB design, the need for clear Read Article

How a Bill of Materials Can Improve Your Supply Chain Management

The Benefits of a Bill of Materials In Supply Chain Management Some of the most complicated engineering projects I’ve worked on were made up of multiple layers of sub-assemblies. Before we could order parts for a new assembly, we needed to go through every component in each tier of the final product to ensure that they would meet the rigorous current, voltage, and temperature derating requirements for different customer applications. The first few times I had to do this, it was by merging dozens of excel Read Article

What Materials to Include in Your Bill of Materials

What Materials to Include in Your Bill of Materials As an electrical engineer, I am constantly impressed with the brilliant designs my colleagues come up with. I’m also constantly shocked to see how mismanaged most of their BOMs are. I’ve been on projects with a huge range of practices for handling a bill of materials. On one end of the spectrum, there was my senior design project, with no BOM at all, just a series of sticky notes my group placed on the front cover flap of our notebooks. Protip Read Article

Why You Should Use PCB Assembly Variants for Multiple Design Configurations

Why You Should Use PCB Assembly Variants for Multiple Design Configurations Years ago I was working on a design that had been copied from an existing board, but there was a problem. A few of the circuits on my layout didn’t match what the engineer had in his schematic. This generated a lot of confusion. We eventually tracked the problem down to some edits that had been made to the board after the design had been approved and sent to fabrication. An inadvertent change to the board while creating an assembly variation had Read Article

Assessing the Post-Development Hardships of Uncontrolled Data Management

Assessing the Post-Development Hardships of Uncontrolled Data Management For every, team, and business, getting to the release state should be the moment where you can breathe a sigh of relief. This moment, unfortunately, doesn’t always lend itself to joyful celebration. Project completion can mean a) you and your team have successfully constructed a design without any flaws in the documentation process and can now prep for its release, or b) you’ve successfully completed your design but realize a minor (or major) Read Article

Capturing Key PCB Design Elements in the Design Document

Capturing Key Design Details in PCB Documentation One of the most important yet often avoided aspects of documenting a design is the formal design document. Too often we finish the design, generate fabrication, assembly, and validation documents then consider the job done. Properly capturing the system specification, design intent, design process and traceability back to the specification is a time-consuming and arduous yet very necessary task. The design document must capture all aspects of the Read Article

Altium Vault Design And Library Migration Guide

Altium Vault Design And Library Migration Guide LIBRARIES AND DATA This guide provides insight into design project migration into Altium Vault. Library Management in Altium Vault is inspired by modern data management systems. Rather than simply lists of components, their designs are enriched by revisions, lifecycle management and traceability of relationships between models, components, library files, and projects. Altium Vault Design and Library Migration Guide Centralization is also improved Read Article

Altium Vault Evaluation Guide

Altium Vault Evaluation Guide To learn more about this topic please see the full solution - Evaluating Altium Vault - at Altium.com. Read Article

Data Management in Four Steps

Data Management in Four Steps When it comes to electronics design, data management is at the bottom of most engineers’ priority list. When you first enter the engineering field, you don’t learn about all the tiny details you need to keep track of during the design process. These minute details build up into the mountain that is data management. Something as simple as finding a previously used part can mean spending your day fumbling between spreadsheets, approved lists, and Read Article

Design Data: Organize to Optimize

Design Data: Organize to Optimize You’re Only as Strong as Your Weakest Link As engineers, we tend to focus on the end technology and forget about the important ECAD design data that actually makes up our designs. The links between technology and design data create something greater than the sum of their . We often overlook the benefits of establishing solid links between our design technology and our design data. The truth is data management provides organization, traceability Read Article

Professional PCB Design Data

Professional PCB Design Data Your PCB design is like a novel. The words of that novel are the buildings blocks you use. You wouldn’t write a novel without defining the language structure; you need syntax, grammar, organization, and diction. You know everything that you want to place in your design, you just have to define it. Once you define the in your ECAD environment, keeping them all organized in libraries can be a challenge. We tend to focus on the end product of our Read Article

Complete Component Library Management for PCB Design Data

Complete Component Library Management for PCB Design Data Complete Management Components are the basic building blocks of designs and even the slightest discrepancy can derail your whole design process. If one bad footprint makes its way through manufacturing, the rest of your design can be invalidated with necessary layout changes. Worst of all, you’ll have to identify everywhere a bad component has been utilized across several designs. The work required to change your layout grows exponentially the Read Article

Design Release Management and Communicating Intent

Design Release Management and Communicating Intent We know that designing and releasing a product involves a multidisciplinary chain of command. Prior to its release, the ECAD side often goes through a series of adaptations to capture the incremental changes to the design. During this stage, the ECAD data is a moving target, which can impede the flow of communication to invested parties. Failure to effectively communicate these changes can have significant consequences on the design release Read Article

Why Would Anyone Migrate from Xpedition Enterprise to Altium Designer?

Why Would Anyone Migrate from Mentor Xpedition Enterprise to Altium Designer? Many users of Xpedition Enterprise didn’t choose it: it was inherited in an acquisition or packaged in a bundle with other products. Now they find they have expensive support costs and many features that they never use. Plus, the tool UI are old and tired, making design more time consuming than it should be. Moving to Altium Designer^® gives you a modern, efficient and unified UI, fast and efficient routing, and superior data management. A few Read Article