Project Management

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Culture Shock: Agile and Individual Engineering Accountability An engineer's prime responsibility has traditionally been to design products for form, fit, and function. It's worked just fine, or well enough, up to this point, right? Well, that depends on how you look at it. A substantial percentage of organizations today report missed deadlines, delayed projects, or canceled projects altogether. Products are changing, and this brings new challenges to the industry. They're becoming less mechanized and more Read Article

28 Manufacturer Sheet Layer A specified manufacturer sheet layer in your design allows manufacturer information to be included within your gerber files. Watch Video

1:14 Find Similar Components Watch Video

Benchmarking Practices and Process for PCB Designers Benchmarking is a company-wide process for analyzing company performance against industry leaders. Companies use it to better understand how their top products perform and allows them to develop plans to improve or adapt specific technologies or practices. Benchmarking uses a set of metrics to measure performance, such as cost per unit of measure, productivity per unit of measure, cycle time of x per unit of measure or defects per unit of measure Read Article

Why PCB Data Management is Important Recently, I celebrated a birthday. Although I do not want to give away my age, let us say I can easily order from any senior menu in a restaurant. I realize the older I get that either I am slowing down or things are speeding up. I concluded it was a bit of both, but much more of the latter. In the words of Charles Dickens in the literary classic A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times it was the worst of times.” Those in the electronics Read Article

PCB Designers Motivated by Data Quality When you look at the many steps involved with a single PCB design, it is easy to get lost in those details. Figuring out our next steps is often overwhelming. When that happens to me, after taking a deep breath, I repeat a common phrase that has become my professional mantra. “Eat the Elephant.” The old riddle is, how do you eat the elephant? Answer: One bite at a time. It is a skill to take a massive project and break it down to its parts Read Article

How to Build a Clean and Consistent PCB Data Library Judy Warner: Cherie, before we get started, please take a moment to define what a “library” is and what the full scope of that entails. Cherie Litson: Most of us would define a “library” as a consistent file of symbols and a consistent file of footprints (decals, land-patterns, etc.) connected with some form of a database. You don’t even need to have the database, just a good schematic symbol file and a footprint file and a method to link them Read Article

Altium VP on New Library and Data Management Tool Concord Pro Lawrence Romine, VP of Marketing for Altium, is here to discuss the release of Altium Concord Pro and it’s aim to provide a fresh approach to library and component management. Romine describes the modern, streamlined experience that reduces context switching, keeps communication in sync and enables an information flow that dramatically improves workflow, productivity and accuracy. We also talk about Altium Designer 19.1, what that includes and Read Article

Dk And How Datasheets Impact Your Design If you design in RF, microwave or millimeter wave frequencies then this podcast is for you. Today we talk to John Coonrad who’s the Technical Marketing Manager for Rogers Corporation, a Global Manufacturer of advanced circuit materials. John talks about what dielectric constant (Dk) is exactly, the various test methods for Dk, why datasheets can sometimes be confusing and how all of this impacts your design. Listen to the Podcast: Download this Read Article

What is PCB Data Management? Above the simple and obvious answer that data management is the management of data, a better definition is: PCB data management is the acquisition, storage, verification, usage, distribution and maintenance of the data used in the design, fabrication, and assembly of a printed circuit board. Acquisition Let’s break this definition down a bit. Before we can talk about the management of the data itself, we should look at what, how, and where we Read Article

How to "Git" Collaborative with Altium Designer Getting collaboration right with any ECAD tool can be rather challenging. For most of us we tend to stick with the “old school” methods: Work on your design Send a zip package via email to another Other works on the design and sends a zip package back to you for review You work on your design and send back to the other Repeat forever This method not only clutters up your inbox but it also forces you to work in a serial fashion. The solution to Read Article

Datasheet Reliability with Ben Jordan When are datasheets accurate and can we rely on them? Ben Jordan is back on the show to discuss datasheets and how to achieve reliability for your use case. We also cover an unusual question from the forum about gilding that you won’t want to miss. Ben always enjoys catching up with the Lounge Forum, and this week, one of our users, Tim Philips, posted a datasheet that he had come across for an inductor. Listen in to explore these topics in this Read Article

21:37 Output Job Files for Rapid, Repeatable PCB Manufacturing Data Generation Watch Video

Project Management Tools My first opportunity to use a project management technique was the Gantt Chart as part of my Engineering Senior Project while in college. At that time, it was all manual. Today, numerous software packages offer it along with other project visibility techniques (Figure 1): Gantt Chart Pert Chart Critical Path Analysis Affinity Diagrams Gap Analysis TimeLine Figure 1. Some of the visualization tools used for project management [1]. No matter what Read Article

Team Development for PCB Designers There Are Lots of I’s in The Word Team The old adage is there is no “i” in the word team. But, in reality, there are a lot of “I’s”—interface, interaction, intercommunication and integration to name a few. In today’s global supply chain (I use the acronym GSC) economy, product development rarely, if ever, rests with just a handful of individuals or even a handful of companies. In the highly competitive electronics market sector, there are Read Article

Flattening Your Workflow: A Guide to “Flat” Style Project Management As flat organizations become more popular so do the methods and processes that come along with them. This blog discusses not the flat organizational structure itself but how a flat organization functions within the project management arena. The principles of project management learned from a flat organization can be adopted in the flattest companies to the most hierarchically structured organizations. Being “flat” is hip but why should I do it Read Article

End-to-End Tracking of Your PCB Design Have you ever run a board re-spin only to discover you’re not even sure what the changes were? I’m not talking about comparing GERBERs from Rev A to Rev B, rather I am referring to understanding the requirements that drove the changes, the reason behind the changes, and all the dialog that was happening around the changes. For most of us we capture these details via email, commit history in our version control system (e.g. Subversion, Perforce Read Article