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Schematic Capture and Schematic Entry

Take Your Shoes Off: Modular Design Tips for Obsolescence Management

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

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

PCB Design Process: The EDA Design Approach

PCB Design Process: The EDA Design Approach The electronic design automation (EDA) approach, which is also referred to as the electronic computer-aided design (ECAD) approach, is composed of a series of software tools that are used to execute and complete the electronic system design process. These systems can include printed boards (PCBs) as well as integrated circuits (ICs). When considering product development for printed circuit boards, a toolchain with a wide array of dissimilar tools Read Article

Advantages of Hierarchical Schematic Designs for PCB Schematic Layouts

Advantages of Hierarchical Block Diagrams and Schematic Designs for PCB Schematic Layouts Hierarchical schematic designs, or block design, can help you better organize PCB schematic layouts by reducing workload for identical blocks of circuitry and enabling design reuse. Read Article

PCB Design Software Features To Consider

PCB Design Software Features To Consider Before making a decision on buying a home, you would probably ask a lot of questions. Is it close to the facilities and services that are important to you? Is it in a good and safe neighborhood? Will the layout of the house satisfy your needs? These are all important questions that need to be answered before you commit to living there. In the same way, buying new PCB design software deserves the same level of scrutiny. You will want to find out Read Article

High Speed Design Techniques: Schematic Considerations

High Speed Design Techniques: Schematic Considerations With my apologies to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for borrowing their lyrics, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…” In this case, however, we are going to be looking at high frequency and high speed PCB design techniques instead of a Hollywood musical, and the beginning happens to be the schematic. You may argue that the place to start would be on the ground plane itself. Board materials, layer stackup planning Read Article

Using ESD Grounding Techniques to Protect Your PCB from Electrical Damage

Using ESD Grounding Techniques to Protect Your PCB from Electrical Damage ESD grounding needs to be implemented in the PCB layout and in the enclosure to ensure devices can be protected from damage. Read Article

How Do Ferrite Beads Work and How Do You Choose the Right One?

How Do Ferrite Beads Work and How Do You Choose the Right One? Ferrite beads are sometimes overused in PCB design, but they can perform important functions in a PCB if you know how to use them. Read Article

Why You Need Integrated Circuit Simulation: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites

Why You Need Integrated Circuit Simulation: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites gives 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: Why You Need Integrated Circuit Simulation. 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 think in the comments Read Article

Why You Need Integrated Circuit Simulation

Why You Need an Integrated Circuit Simulator Integrated Circuit Simulation: integrated circuit simulator, or simulating ICs? You aren’t a newbie anymore but here’s why we say keep the integrated circuit creator in your toolkit. As your career progresses, you become more confident. You’ll tend to collect circuits you know work well in different designs - power supplies, filters, oscillators, etc. Most of the time these reusable blocks will work great in any place you choose to use them, but Read Article

Through hole technology and plated through-hole circuit board mounting for PCBs

Why Use Plated Through Hole Technology in PCB Design? Plated through hole technology components remain important or required in many applications. Learn more about through-hole mounting technology in PCB design. Read Article

The Wild West of PCB Design - Part Choice Showdown

The Wild West of PCB Design - Part Choice Showdown Does your part selection process ever feel like a wild west showdown, where every stakeholder is out to protect their own self-interests at the expense of your own? Learn how to turn your part choice selections into a win-win for your entire design team with a new feature in Altium Designer^® 16. Link Does your part selection process ever feel like a scene from a wild west movie, where every stakeholder is out to protect their own self-interests Read Article

How to Avoid the Most Common Errors in Your Schematic Design Process

How to Avoid the Most Common Errors in Your Schematic Design Process There are over 100 errors a PCB designer can make in the schematic design process. Are you catching them all in your current design criteria review process? Read on to find out how you can better catch some of the most common PCB design mistakes. A Decade of Differences Schematic designs review processes were a lot simpler 10 years ago, and the schematic review process to check for errors didn’t seem to require such a huge dedication of man-hours Read Article

5 Time-Saving Productivity Features in Altium Designer You Need to Be Using Now

5 PCB Designer Productivity Features in Altium Designer You Need to Be Using Now Are you getting the most efficiency out of your Altium Designer^® workflow? Use these 5 time-saving features to enhance your PCB design productivity. I sat down to talk with some of our best and brightest at Altium Designer, those who have poured countless hours and effort into learning, using, and developing Altium Designer. Why? I wanted to extract the top 5 productivity features they use day in and day out that shave hours off of their design Read Article

How to use Schematic CAD Drawings for Cable Assemblies: Part 3

How to use Schematic CAD Drawings for Cable Assemblies: Part 3 The long-anticipated part 3 in Sainesh Solanki's Cable and Harness Design blog series is here! This installment continues the establishment of libraries with connector heads and crimp lugs, as well as how to model heat shrinks. We introduce some parameters too, which enable wire-to-crimp compatibility checks. You can access part 2 here, but if you're all caught up, read on! Creating Components Continued... Two additional schematic symbols can be Read Article

Power Nets Management: Circuit Board Best Practices

Power Nets Management: Circuit Board Best Practices A recent BugCrunch item (Power input vs output) raised the long standing issue of power management in Altium Designer^®. PCB fabrication can be a complicated process when considering all of the items that go into it. Between the vias, solder mask, and solder, things can get messy. To ensure we are all on the same page, I have some opinions on PCB assembly before work gets started. As always, I will be very interested in your thoughts and comments Read Article

The Transition of Transistors

The Transition of Transistors: A Transistor History Timeline Even if you’re not an electrical engineer, chances are you still love technology and all it offers, whether it be for work or pleasure. We all get caught up in the buzz when a new processor comes out and hear things like how Intel is using a 14nm (nanometer) technology and has over a billion graphene transistors. But what exactly is this technology and for what device? Back to the Basics As complicated as the world of engineering can be Read Article