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Thought Leadership
How Absorbing Conformal Coatings Affect Your PDN and Radiated EMI
Signal integrity analysis and measurements go hand-in-hand I remember the first time I— back in my days of working with sensors —pumped nitrogen dioxide into a humid environmental chamber while evaluating a DUT. Over time, the surface of my copper leads slowly corroded as they sat unprotected in such a noxious environment. As my electronics experiment was living a double life as a chemistry experiment, I questioned whether to use a conformal
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Power Integrity Measurements for Your Prototype Board
We often write about signal integrity and power integrity around here, but there is one area where we sometimes fall short: test and measurement. Both aspects of building a new device are critical for ensuring your board will work as intended and meets stringent performance requirements. With advanced systems, the level of testing and measurements required to qualify a prototype for full-scale production spans far beyond using a multimeter. Power
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Follow Your Multilayer Ground Return Path to Prevent EMI
Following the path back to ground can quickly become complex in a complicated multilayer PCB. When your PCB has a small layer count (e.g., a 4-layer board with two plane layers), it becomes rather easy to determine the return path and deliberately design it to prevent EMI. The situation becomes more complicated when you’re working with higher layer counts. Multiple plane layers and conductors can form the ground return path, even if the conductor
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Problems in Multiboard BOM Generation? Unified Design Tools Can Help
Dealing with a multiboard BOM can feel like shuffling stacks of paper... Your next multiboard system design is likely complicated enough. You’ve got to worry about multiple layouts, multiple schematics, signal integrity within and between boards, mechanical form and function, and EMI/EMC. With all these design aspects to worry about, documenting every aspect of your board can be a time suck. With so many new products being built from multiboard
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Signal Distortion in Your PCB: Sources and Solutions
Length matching for high-speed signals is all about synchronization... Signal distortion often gets a passing mention in many discussions on signal integrity and circuit analysis. As more networking products start running at higher speeds and use complicated modulation schemes, you’ll find that signal distortion becomes a serious problem that contributes to bit error rates. Distortion sources are cited as one of the primary bottlenecks preventing
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Electronics System-Level Circuit Engineering Design in Altium Designer
Electronics system level design lets you focus on functionality and abstraction The day-to-day life of a PCB layout engineer is all about translating schematics into a real, manufacturable PCB. Before this can happen, designs begin at an abstract level that focuses on designing functionality. As the overall design process progresses, design requirements are made more granular, reaching the signal processing level and, eventually, the component
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How to Create an Amplifier Simulation in Altium Designer
There are a variety of performance simulations you can run in Altium Designer. Read and understand the role of simulation and learn how to create and run an amplifier simulation in your schematic.
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DC Analysis of Linear and Nonlinear Circuits in Schematic Design
These circuits can always use DC analysis If you’re working with a new design that involves some custom circuitry, it always helps to understand how the circuit behaves in DC. There is some merit to this, particularly if you are designing a custom power conditioning system, amplifier, equalizer, or other circuit. These circuits and many more require a range of analyses to evaluate their functionality, but the most fundamental of these is a DC
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Three Common PCB Design Mistakes You Can Spot in Your Gerbers
Spotting some common PCB design mistakes will help get your board into production faster I’ll admit that I was not an excellent student until I hit graduate school. At that point, I started putting more energy into my homework than most other areas of my life. Sure, my social life became non-existent, but I soon became an exemplary student and I never looked back. Just like you need to do your homework while in school, you should do your homework
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Length Matching for High-speed Signals: Trombone, Accordion, and Sawtooth Tuning
Once upon a time, length matching guidelines for high-speed signals required a designer with enough skill to remain productive when manually applying different trace-length turning schemes. With today's advanced interactive routing features in modern PCB design tools, designers no longer need to manually draw out length tuning structures in a PCB layout. The remaining choice for a designer is deciding which length-matching scheme to use: trombone
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Tools for Transient Signal Analysis in Circuit Design
You can perform transient signal analysis with any of these circuits with the right simulator. I still remember my first differential equations class. One of the first topics that was discussed was damped oscillator circuits and transient signal response, which arises in many different physical systems. A transient response in an interconnect and on power rails in your PCB is a source of bit errors, timing jitter, and other signal integrity
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What is the Electrical Return Path in a PCB?
One of the fundamental aspects of any circuit diagram is the return current path or electrical return path. In a circuit diagram and a schematic diagram, the path the current follows to return to the low potential side of a power source should be obvious, but it may not be so obvious in a PCB. To quote the great Eric Bogatin at his PCB West 2019 presentation, the distinction between a schematic diagram and a PCB layout lives in the white space of
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Avoid Common Pad and Via Problems in Your Last-Minute PCB DFM Check
You’ll want to examine your pads and vias for these components during a DFM check There are times where you’ll need to make last minute changes to your board before you send it off to a manufacturer. Similarly, you may need to modify an existing design before sending it off for manufacturing, which may require swapping components as well as slightly rearranging traces and other components. This can occur due to unavailable components or simple
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RF Signal Chain Design for FMCW Chirped Radar Systems
If you could hear the output from your chirped radar system, it might sound like a brahminy starling In automotive and UAV radar applications, radar signals are amplified throughout the signal chain. Amplification is critical for ensuring the reflected signal can be accurately detected and for maximizing the range and resolution of your radar system. Although there are some ICs that integrate an entire signal chain into a single package, these
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RF Power Amplifier Impedance Matching at Microwave and mmWave Frequencies
According to MarketWatch , the overall market for RF amplifiers is expected to surpass $27 billion by 2023. So where are all of these RF amplifiers expected to be used? You can thank 5G and the expansion of cellular networks in general for a healthy portion of the expected growth. For the PCB designers out there, RF amplifier impedance matching becomes an important design point, especially with high power amplifiers. Large-signal RF Amplifier
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Solving Component Library Errors During PCB Layout Reuse
With the right PCB design package, you can even reuse layouts for these old cell phones I recently bought a new computer after data on my old hard drive started to “magically” become corrupted. Once I broke into my new computer and transferred my data over, I became worried I wouldn’t be able to reuse my old data. When it comes to simpler things like text files or images, you’ll have no problems; you can immediately reopen and reuse these files
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77 GHz Radar for Automotive Radar PCBs: Routing and Signal Integrity
Technology moves quickly these days, and automotive radar has transferred from primarily operating near a 24 GHz to a 77 GHz wavelength shortly after its introduction into new vehicles for object detection. Recent regulation changes have allowed the transition to 77 GHz, which provides a number of benefits. Shorter wavelengths facilitate wider bandwidths, and provide better resolution, smaller device form factors, and longer range. This band just
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