Release Management

Browse our resouce library to learn more about releasing your design and generating the necessary manufacturering output files.

18:49 Communicating Design Intent with Manufacturing Outputs No one wants to do a board respin because of inaccurate or incomplete manufacturing outputs confusing design intent. This webinar Watch Video

Complete Guide to PCB Design Reuse in the Cloud Isaac Newton once said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." Not all designs need to be remade from scratch, and if you organize your designs properly you can easily reuse your old design data in a new project. PCB design reuse practices are great for cutting down design time and ensuring all your products live up to the same level of quality. It’s all about making sure the knowledge you’ve gained from building Read Article

Git Tagging and Git for Hardware Development in Altium Designer The concept of revisioning in electronics design has stayed fairly standard across the industry. A revision will typically consist of a letter and sometimes contain a number. There are many other revision schemes which people have experimented with, but, from my experience, the standard letter revision seems to be prevalent within our industry. One question that I have always asked myself is: What happened to all the revisions in between? I Read Article

Continuous Deployment: An Implementation Using Altium Designer In Continuous Integration and Deployment in ECAD we discussed the concept of Continuous Deployment within a build system. In this article, we will take a deeper look at how to set up continuous delivery and deployment systems so your team and vendors can enjoy a continuous stream of updated ECAD packages for review. Continuous Deployment/Delivery: Revisited In Continuous Integration: An Implementation Using Altium Designer we went through the Read Article

Continuous Integration: An Implementation Using Altium Designer In a previous article, Continuous Integration and Deployment in ECAD, we discussed the concept of Continuous Integration while testing within a build system (leveraging Git). In this article, we will take a deeper look at how to set this up and run these “tests” against one’s PCB design project. Continuous Integration Tests: Revisited In Software Engineering, the purpose of implementing Continuous Integration into a workflow is to prevent one’s Read Article

Continuous Integration and Deployment in ECAD Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment have become widely adopted practices within the software world. The concept of Continuous Integration and Deployment don’t need to be limited to just software - they can be extended into the ECAD world as well. In this article we will address both concepts and how they can be leveraged in ECAD tools. Continuous Deployment Designers will frequently make changes to their code and check it into the Read Article

EMC Certification and Your Product I’ve spent most of my career in electronics working with or for small businesses and startups, and helping them shape ideas into a physical product. Some recurring misconceptions I faced with almost every client were regarding Electromagnetic Compatibility compliance. Many had no idea that their products would need EMC testing, some were unaware of the duration of time and cost of certification, and others were unaware of how requirements applied Read Article

Requirements Management and Quality Functional Deployment “Ending up in the wrong place is the result of bad directions, not bad driving. Product failure in the marketplace results from errors in requirements, not implementation.” - Thomas L. Musto, Chairman, IBM Corporation (Retired) A definition of QFD: Quality-Functional-Deployment (QFD) [literal translation of the Japanese characters] is an analytical method to help you transform customer needs (the voice of the customer [VOC]) into engineering Read Article

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 Prototyping in the U.S. is a Crucial Element For Success Within today’s global design and manufacturing environment, moving PCB manufacturing offshore is our industry’s de facto product development process. Many believe that PCB prototyping could and should be moved offshore to take advantage of the rising skill and capability levels of the offshore resources in Taiwan, China and Korea. This has led to a crisis in the U.S. PCB prototyping industry. U.S.-based companies find it difficult to stay in 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

Project Release Management within PCB Design Software You’ve worked night and day to get your PCB design done and finally, the last trace has been connected, the last silkscreen reference has been tweaked, and the final DRC has passed. It’s time to call it a weekend, right? Wrong. You’ve still got a boatload of work to do in order to get all of your output files created for your manufacturers. A lot of PCB design tool vendors provide different mechanisms for making the creation of output files Read Article

Team Design Support Makes Rapid Prototyping a Breeze If you’re looking to document features and changes in your next PCB, word processing software and email chains simply won’t do the trick. Keeping information consistent over time and across an organization takes design software that enforces a consistent data format that is accessible by everyone on your team. If you’re using design modules with different workflows and data formats, you might as well be creating documentation using pen and paper Read Article

Managing Your PCB Design Through BOM Planning: What’s Important Back in my younger days, I was infatuated with Legos. Every chance I had, I would run into the toy store with a pocket full of change from weekly chores swiping as many sets as I could afford. Looking back on these days, I’m surprised at how complex these structures were that I (at the ripe age of 8) was actually able to assemble. It never seemed like it was too difficult of a task either. I never felt incredibly overwhelmed with the procurement Read Article

PCB Floorplanning: The First Step to PCB Design Integrity You’ve just received your first protoboards, and you are excited to put them into the product and fire them up. You love your design and you are ready to rock. The product goes into the EMI chamber, and it fails emissions. The product is noisy. You dive in with the test engineer to investigate. As you slowly unplug cables to isolate the noise, you find out your PCB is the cause. You think, no problem, I put filters on the board. You start Read Article

Optimizing Your BOM for Rapid Prototype Manufacturing With how interconnected the world is, I’m still in awe of all the people knowing and learning multiple languages. Luckily as an engineer, we all are able to speak a common language when it comes to any engineering subject: numbers. No matter where you live zero is zero, pi is pi, and 2+2 will always equal, hold on let me grab my calculator, 4. In our current design and manufacturing ecosystem, we are often tasked with working with manufacturers Read Article