Project Management

Scope Your PCB Design Data Management System for Success

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 Read Article

Culture Shock: Agile and Individual Engineering Accountability

Culture Shock: Agile and Individual Accountability for Mechanical Engineering 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

1:14 Find Similar Components Watch Video

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

Benchmarking Practices and Process for PCB Designers

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

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

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

PCB Library Standardization: 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

Dk And How Datasheets Impact Your Design

Dk Values And How Datasheets Impact Your Design In this OnTrack episode we'll talk about Dielectric constant (Dk) and the difference between Design Dk & Process Dk. How datasheets can be confusing and can impact your design? Listen in for more. Read Article

What is PCB Data Management

What is PCB Data Management? Successful design and manufacture of any PCB requires managing data. Every PCB project includes a ton of data on the components, front-end schematics, the physical layout, and manufacturing files. There is other documentation that may be needed that is not captured in your PCB design software. This all has to be tracked and managed by the designer because working with incomplete or out-of-date data will result in a design that doesn't perform as Read Article

How to "Git" Collaborative with Altium Designer

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

Datasheet Reliability with Ben Jordan In this OnTrack episode Judy Warner and Ben Jordan discuss about Datasheet Reliability. Can you trust them? And what does “Gilded” mean? This & more about verifying app notes. Watch the full episode. Read Article

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

49:24 New Product Overview: Altium Concord Pro Altium Concord Pro^™ as a standalone product and brand name has been discontinued and the capabilities are now available as Watch Video

Project Management Tools

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

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

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