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Thought Leadership
USB Charger Project in Altium Designer: Part 1
When I’m in my office, I keep my pluggable USB charger around, otherwise the battery on my phone is likely to run out. If you want to build your own USB charger, you can create your own USB charger board with the powerful schematic design and layout tools in Altium Designer. Here, I’ll present the overall design process for a portable USB charger. The charger requires 12 V of power and charges two external devices through two USB ports. We’ll
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Important Thermal Properties of PCB Substrate Materials
Signal integrity isn’t the full story, the thermal properties of your PCB substrate materials are also important for reliability.
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Differences Between Prepreg Material vs. PCB Core: What Designers Need to Know
I sometimes get questions from designers that want to know more about the PCB material selection and manufacturing process. Although I’m not a manufacturer, it behooves designers to understand something about the materials they have available when working on a new project. One question I get is on the exact differences between PCB core vs. prepreg materials. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, including by novice designers; I’ll admit I
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Power Plane and Ground Planes: Should You Use Your PCB Power Plane as a Return Path?
Power planes (sometimes called a power layer) and ground planes are important for more than just distribution of supplying power. When defining reference planes, both with impedance controlled routing and in managing return paths, your stackup might force return currents to pass into a PCB power plane before being coupled back to a ground layer. Even though you define a GND reference layer as a the basis for your impedance-controlled trace width
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Using Prepreg vs. Core for Controlled Impedance Routing
When I was first learning the finer points of PCB design, my first impression that the core was some type of special material that did not have close resemblance to the other layers. This is not necessarily the case, but designers need to work within the core/prepreg stackup constraints imposed by the PCB manufacturing process. Although you may be constrained as to how the layers in your board are arranged, you can choose which core/prepreg
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The Fundamentals of High Speed SerDes Design
High speed SerDes design goes far beyond computer peripherals The challenges in high speed SerDes design filter right down to the PCB level and are all about backplane/daughtercard design, transmission line layout, selecting proper equalization schemes, and much more. This even gets down to the fundamentals, where stackup and power integrity become critical when driving transmitters and receiver ICs. If you’re designing a PCB as part of a SerDes
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Some Pre-layout Power Spectrum Analyzer PCB Tips in Altium Designer
Take advantage of your simulation tools before test and measurement. Here I want to expand a bit on the power spectrum analysis features in Altium Designer
®
. In a previous post , we looked at working with simulations involving a frequency modulated signal fed into a nonlinear component (an NPN transistor). In this simulation, we ended with the Fourier spectrum at the load resistor for various values of base voltage/current. In the time-domain
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PCB Bus Routing and Layout: The Basics
Power supply on a network switch Modern computing simply wouldn’t be possible without PCB bus routing and layout. The same goes for many digital systems that manipulate data in parallel. If you’re working on a new PCB design and you need to route a bus between different devices, there are some simple rules to follow to ensure your signals aren’t distorted and that successive devices are triggered correctly. As some designers may question the
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High Speed Routing Guidelines for Advanced PCBs
You can create this advanced board with these high speed routing guidelines for advanced PCBs Newer designs are continuing to get faster, with PCIe 5.0 reaching 32 Gb/s, and PAM4 pushing signal integrity and speeds to the limit. Proper interconnect design must account for the lower noise margins of advanced devices, impeccable power stability requirements, and much more to ensure signals can be received properly. With advanced devices running at
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MIPI Physical Layer Routing and Signal Integrity
MIPI physical layer routing (C-PHY) is typically used to connect these smartphone cameras to a processor. When most designers talk about routing standards, particularly for advanced devices, they typically refer to differential routing standards (e.g., LVDS) that enable high data rates. These signaling standards have proliferated computers, networking equipment, smart electronics, and other areas, and they have been critical for operating with
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EMI from Capacitor Heatsinks and What You Can Do About It
Selecting the right heatsink can help you keep your system cool and prevent EMI . While it may not be obvious, or while most designers may not think to check, heatsinks can generate EMI when they are connected to a switching element. This is a common problem in power supply design, and whenever a heatsink is placed in contact with a component that switches with high current draw at high frequency. Reducing EMI from heatsinks requires balancing
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Some Techniques for Suppressing DC-DC Converter EMI in IoT Products
This Li ion battery is most likely connected to a switching regulator to provide stable power. Suppressing EMI susceptibility in IoT devices from various sources is critical to ensuring your new product will work as designed. Similarly, your IoT product should limit spurious emissions if you want it to comply with EMC regulations. Among the various sources of radiated EMI from your next product, EMI within the device itself should also be
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Load Line Analysis for Nonlinear Circuits in Altium Designer
If you’re in the business of analog circuit design, then you’ll likely need to run simulations of your system to determine its functionality. Linear systems are rather intuitive, even in the case where strong feedback becomes an important determinant of stability. With nonlinear circuits, this can get more complicated, and it’s not always easy to see how the system operates unless you have some experience with similar systems. Transistors and
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SMPS Circuit Design: Which Switching Frequency to Use?
Power supply on a network switch Power electronics and switched-mode power supply (SMPS) designers should know that working with higher switching frequencies can lead to higher switching losses in your system. However, the push to miniaturize power supplies, and the components that go into them, compels designers to work with higher switching frequencies in their SMPS circuit designs. This then creates problems where switching losses and noise
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Frequency Modulation Simulation in Altium Designer
When working with analog signals, you need to ensure your device is operating linearly in order to prevent problems like harmonic distortion during operation. Nonlinear interactions in analog devices lead to distortion that corrupts a clean analog signal. It may not be obvious when an analog circuit clips just from looking at your schematic or datasheets. Instead of tracing through your signal chain manually, you can use simulation tools to get
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Delay Tuning for High Speed Signals: What You Need to Know
Length matched lines in a PCB Take a look at two signal readouts on an oscilloscope, and you can see how length/timing mismatches between signal traces can improperly trigger downstream gates. The situation becomes worse when we look at the travel time for a master clock signal and the roundtrip time for sent/received data in different computer interfaces. SDRAM has solved this nicely by placing a clock in the slave device and sending a clock
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Radiated EMI Sources in High Speed/High Frequency PCBs
Radiated EMI measurements during EMC testing The image above shows a snapshot of results from an EMC test under CISPR requirements (U.S. uses FCC certification requirements). This product is right at the edge of Class B limits on radiated emissions. We can see a very complicated resonance spectrum in this plot with a large number of sharp peaks superimposed on wide peaks at lower level. What causes all of this radiated noise? There a number of
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