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Thought Leadership
PCB Creativity and Training: Utilizing Creative Routing Solutions with Tight Component Placement
When I was working in a research lab and designing PCBs for our homemade optical systems, my layouts were down and dirty. We didn’t worry about little things like packaging, limited board space, or compact routing. We were happy as long as we could get all of the required components to appear on the board and eventually the board became a printed circuit. Once our microscope systems became more intricate, connecting our high speed, custom images
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Easily Placed Surface Mount Technology with 3D Viewing Software
Years ago while designing a printed circuit board for one of my company’s products, I was called over to the mechanical design department for an impromptu meeting. They had pulled in my design files into their 3D mechanical CAD system and wanted to show me something. There it was as big as life; one of my tall electrolytic capacitors was sticking up right through the plastic enclosure. While trying to restrain their laughter, they sarcastically
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How a Components Search Engine Helps You Choose Parts For Your PCB
If you owned a computer during the 1990’s, then you remember when internet search engines became massively popular. Most homepages were likely set to one of the three or four major search engines. This made surfing the digital highway so much easier, and now search functionality is integrated in many different websites and applications. Anytime you need to quickly locate specific entries in a large database, using a search engine is the fastest
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Browsing Electronic Component Distributor Inventory with Integrated Libraries
Even though I make a lot of lists just to keep track of all the different activities going on with my business, it gets tiring. When I need to buy office supplies, it helps to have all my options in one place so that I can figure out where I need to go to buy everything. Thankfully, when you’re sourcing for your PCB, there are solutions that show you all your distributor options. Browsing through distributor websites to source components for your
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Build Your Next Engineering BOM With Integrated Design Software
It’s easy to collaborate on a project with a small number of people. I’ve always found that two or three people can thoroughly hash out the details on a project in person and produce great results. But as a team grows in size, you’ll spend more time reading and writing documentation. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it helps formalize processes and products across an organization and ensures that everyone can stay on the same page. Any new
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When to Prefer Longer PCB Traces Over Additional Vias
Whenever I go to buy a new big-ticket appliance, I always weigh my options. Sometimes I let this paralyze me, and I end up making a spending decision that I later regret. But it doesn’t have to be this way when deciding how to route signals in your next PCB. When you have many components and interconnects to place on your PCB, you need to weigh your options. Dense routing is as much an art as it is science, and having as much information as
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Electronic Parts Sourcing with Integrated Component Libraries
The weekend is grocery time at our house, and we always make a thorough list of everything we need for the next two weeks and where we will be buying it. You may not be as meticulous as my wife and I when it comes to buying groceries, but it pays to be thorough when you need to build a bill of materials for your PCB. Once you’ve got your design complete, you need to ask yourself: where am I going to get all of these components I just placed in my
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Identify Vendor Parts Early: Manage BoMs Proactively With Consolidated Part Sourcing
Walking a tightrope requires intricate balance. Simply visualized as a walker and a rope in space. Simple moves into complexity when the walker’s senses are skewed to balance. Careful placement of each foot pulls from neurological pathways communicating intricate information simultaneously. Should information fail to arrive when the foot is moving may push the walker off the rope. Managing Bills of Material from early circuit concept through
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What is Lenz's Law or Simulation and How Does it Affect PCB Design?
Lenz's law is one of the fundamental physical laws that describes the multitude of relationships between electricity and magnetism. Together with Ampere's law, Gauss law, Faraday's law, Coulomb's law, and the Lorentz force law, we have everything we need to understand the classical behavior of the electromagnetic field. Among these laws, Lenz's law and Faraday's law work together to describe how the magnetic field in your PCB is related to the
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What to do With Unused Pins on a Microcontroller
I must admit that I’m not exactly the right person to turn to for cleaning tips. I dread the annual spring cleaning as there are always surprises in the storerooms to deal with. Occasionally, I stumble upon items that I barely even recognize but eventually decide to hold on to. While my indecisiveness with unused items results in some nagging from my wife and loss of additional space, failing to deal with unused pins on a microcontroller can have
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A Complete Bill of Materials and Other Suggestions for Error Free PCB Manufacturing
Long before my youngest son became a teenager, we already knew that in everything that he did he worked at turning the situation around to best benefit himself. At one point he was doing something that he shouldn’t be doing, and I told him that if he continued down that path that I would ground him. Instead of backing off as I expected, he instead had a contemplative look on his face as he asked me; “for how long would I be grounded?” I couldn’t
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Don't Undervalue Ease of User Interface
You know how cooking can get complicated when you aren’t in your own kitchen? Since they aren’t “right where you left them”, you have to hunt for a pan or utensil that will work for what you are doing. It takes more time and possibly burning some eggs while you are looking for a spatula. And that’s just cooking something simple for breakfast; imagine trying to prepare a complicated meal. Situations like this are what help the restaurant business
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Count the Cost With Rigid Flexible PCB Cost Comparison
When my oldest boy bought his first car I was worried that he might have made a mistake. Sadly my worries turned out to be true and he was stuck with a lemon. I believe that his exact words were; “It seemed like such a good deal at the time”. He thought that paying less money for an older car would be a benefit, and of course, his actual experience was the exact opposite. The old expression of “count the cost” before you buy applies to everything
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Altium Vault Streamlines Product Development Process With Early Access to Component Sourcing and Costing Instead of Placeholders
The product development process for printed circuit assemblies is highly dependent on complete Bills of Material. Complete Bills of Material list the PCB along with all components soldered or adhered onto the board to make the assembly. Components are unavailable early in the product development cycle because EDA libraries are antiquated and lack current parts information when circuit designers are drawing schematics. To stay on the development’s
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Find Replacement Electronic Components With an Integrated Library
Much as we would like, designing a new product or system is not without its hiccups. Designs, functionality, and component changes may be made at the last minute, forcing design modification or component replacement. Replacement circuit components or replacement can require thorough knowledge of your circuit boards. Repairing a circuit board is often more than finding a circuit breaking. Electrical equipment and service panel tinkering can go so
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PCB Manufacturing: Access Databases vs. Integrated Design Software For Bills of Materials
Building databases in programs like Access is easy enough. Access databases deserve a lot of credit for helping organize tons of information in one place. But adapting these programs to electronics design can be a real challenge. Any PCB that is intended for manufacturing must have a corresponding bill of materials. This document is critical as it lists all of information about your PCB in a standardized format. Your bill of materials contains a
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HDI PCB Designs and the CAD Tools Behind Them
Although it is said that the only guarantees in life are death and taxes, I would submit that the third guarantee in life is that electronic devices will continue to get smaller and smaller. I’m pretty sure that no one wants their cell phone to grow back to the size of a brick again, so to continue this path of ever decreasing sized electronics means that circuit boards need to shrink in size as well. The best way to do this is to use high
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