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SPICE: Certainty for All Decisions
Design, validate, and verify the most advanced schematics.
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Signal Integrity
GPS Antennas in Your PCB Design: You Won’t Get Lost Again
Going on hunting trips with my grandpa as a kid, we would carry a rather large GPS-navigator to help us keep from getting lost in the woods. It had a huge antenna sticking out the top and its battery never lasted longer than a few hours. Fast forward 20 years, and including GPS capabilities in your PCB design has become easier than ever. Many new consumer devices include GPS PCB antenna modules in their design. If you don’t have GPS or RF-design
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Preventing Ground Loops in Your PCB Design
I think we’ve all been there. You buy that awesome stereo system only to hear that familiar humming sound in the background. When you take it back to the store the clerk blames the manufacturer. What components are to be considered a problem? The decoupling capacitor or ground wire? How about the bypass capacitor or PCB ground loop design interference? The stereo manufacturer will blame the component manufacturer and the component manufacturer
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With RF Circuit Impedance in Mind Your Designs Won't Look Bird-Brained
Several years ago, scientists compared the aerodynamic characteristics of several bird species with different species of bats. Feathered bird wings become inactive during the upstroke and maintain lift. Every downstroke increases thrust, lift, and flight speed. In contrast, bats have membranous wings that produce lift during the upstroke. Regardless of their methods, birds and bats overcome weight and drag to achieve flight efficiency. Two
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Crystal Oscillators in Your PCB Layout Keep Frequencies Steady
For most of human history, we relied on astronomical timekeeping to plan our lives. Now we have sophisticated clocks that help us manage daily life. As modern life becomes ever more frantic, we need to keep track of fractions of a second. Electronic pcb layout crystal oscillator guidelines are the secret sauce that makes this possible. The output clock signal from a Schmitt-trigger oscillator or a 555 timer is controlled using an RC time constant
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High Currents and High Temperature: PCB Design Tips for Heat Management
I remember the first (and hopefully the only) time one of my circuits caught on fire. It started with the resistors and quickly spread to a nearby decoupling capacitor. Thankfully, the destruction was minor and most of the components were salvageable. Why did this happen you ask? No, this was not due to a short circuit. Very simply, I did not take into account the high current PCB layout. As electronics continue to be miniaturized, the thermal
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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
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Build Your RF Circuit Design Away From a Catastrophic Crescendo
The art of music composition combines different elements such ranging from chord progression to the melody. A composer usually creates from experience, may learn from other musicians and builds from an understanding of music theory. Successful music composition relies on tried and true methods, formulas, schemes, and models. Music composition also depends on the respect for fundamentals like reading, writing, and thinking music notation while
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Aspect Ratios and Their Importance to Multi-Layered PCBs
There’s a certain level of gratification that comes with doing something challenging. In my off time, I tinker with carving spoons and other utensils. They seem incredibly simple to make but the difficulty comes in making the curve just right, smoothing out the wood, and adding any ornate finishes you want on the handle. When embarking on the manufacturing journey post PCB design, you may be one of the skilled few who have taken on the challenge
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PCB Layout Tips for Hall Sensor PCBs and Other Hall Effect Applications
To me, one of the coolest things about kids is how much they can be amazed by science and other phenomena that, as an adult, you’ve just grown to accept. I gave a five-year old homemade magnetic slime for his birthday one year; consisting of iron oxide powder, Elmer’s glue, and liquid starch, the prospect of a black gooey mess delighted everyone except for the boy’s mother. No one could dispute the fun involved with mixing the stuff or the
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Multi-board Design, a discussion with Ben Jordan
Join Altium’s Judy Warner and Ben Jordan for a conversation on Multiboard PCB design. Listen to the Podcast: Download this episode (right click and save) Watch the video: Show Highlights: Many different product areas are being impacted by developments in Electronics, opening new frontiers - beauty products, wearables Electronics are replacing things that traditionally were not electronics Electronics product development are increasingly driven by
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PCB Chassis Might Keep Your PCB Design From Exhausting Itself
The world of racing is something that both fascinates and eludes me. On one hand, it’s thrilling to watch cars that have been fine-tuned to the most minute weight and aerodynamic requirements go flying down a road or around a track. On the other hand, from my experience, the majority of thrill from the sport largely comes from the accumulation of narratives and knowledge beforehand. I don’t care so much about actually watching the cars run smooth
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Ground Bounce Reduction Techniques to Minimize Signal Integrity Issues
Unlike my dad who thrived on the basketball team during his school days, I could barely bounce the ball during tryouts. Needless to say, I quit sports before I even started. While my dreams of becoming an NBA pro were dashed, I later discovered my passion for martial arts. I never really got into handling a basketball well, but in martial arts at least I could bounce off the balls of my feet to meet my opponent. Not being able to bounce the
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Practice Makes Perfect: Testing and Verifying Electronic Component Assemblies during PCB Design
When I was younger, well much younger, I had dreams of one day being a pro athlete. I wanted to be the guy who scored the winning touchdown, knocked in the winning run or hit the buzzer-beater. Although I never made to the professional level, I did have some success and I learned a lot. The most important thing was the results you achieved were strictly tied to your preparation. In other words, if I wanted to do well in the game I had to test
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Learning Current Density: Don’t Pop the Balloon
One area of PCB design that probably does not get the attention that it deserves is current density. Current density in a PCB trace is much like the pressure in a balloon. You want to squeeze as much air into the balloon as you can, but if you put too much: boom! The same is true of PCB traces many times. We want the traces to be as small as possible yet carry the most current possible, and if the trace carries too much: boom! For PCBs, that boom
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Searching for Clarity of Signal by Addressing Integrity Issues in PCB Design
The clarity of TV signal transmission these days is amazing. I can still remember the days when I had a set of rabbit ears perched atop my 19” RCA. It was a challenge to position them just right to get the clearest picture, not to mention having to adjust them for every channel. Sometimes it’d take all night just to find the channel I wanted, so I’d sit down for five minutes and then head to bed. And if the weather was bad, forget about it. While
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Backroads or Highway: Managing PCB Power Distribution with a PDN Analyzer
Who hasn’t been caught daydreaming out the window, overlooking the lines of cars on the freeway at a standstill, wondering about easier or more effective ways of getting to your job on time? And even then, sometimes the alternate routes aren’t always the fastest—there could be road construction, or an event going on which makes you have to re-route even more. At that point, most tend to throw all hopes for getting to work on time out the window
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Boats With The Current: Microstrip and Stripline Transmission Lines Trade-offs
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick Carraway, is torn between infiltrating the notorious elite social circles by attending his neighbor Jay Gatsby’s infamous mansion parties in Long Island, New York and establishing himself on the east coast in a finance career. It can be easy to have an understanding of The Great Gatsby through its context - the roaring twenties, flappers, prohibition - it wouldn’t do justice to any of
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