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Thought Leadership
BOM Part Number Management: Why It Should Be Automated
If you’ve ever worked with high voltages or have designed a high voltage circuit, you know that they always require careful planning. In my last job, we had been using a particular high voltage power supply circuit for years. When it was initially designed, the board took longer than usual to complete. While its design required some extra finicking, it was worth the effort. Everything was going well until the larger assembly's design was modified
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What Materials to Include in Your Bill of Materials
As an electrical engineer, I am constantly impressed with the brilliant designs my colleagues come up with. I’m also constantly shocked to see how mismanaged most of their BOMs are. I’ve been on projects with a huge range of practices for handling a bill of materials. On one end of the spectrum, there was my senior design project, with no BOM at all, just a series of sticky notes my group placed on the front cover flap of our notebooks. Protip
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Why Designing a High Voltage PCB for Rapid Prototyping Is More Effective Than Rushing to Form Factor
Remember that fable we all were told as kids about the tortoise and the hare? The moral of the story was that slow and steady wins the race. In engineering, this is especially true when it comes to creating a consumer product quickly. However, this practice is rarely the approach we take. I personally experienced this when I rushed the design of a dimmer for the IOT market. In fact, I was making two dimmers. The first dimmer was simpler and used
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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
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How To Design Internet Of Things Devices: Make Them Simple and Universal
Greed is a natural human tendency that promises much but often leaves us with nothing. My father grew up in a gold rich area of Africa. A miner once told my father and his friends that they could keep as much of his gold as they could carry by hand for 5 miles. My father and his friends each took their turns, but all of them tried to carry too much and couldn’t even make it one mile. The temptation to attempt too much, or keep too much to oneself
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How to Find the Best PCB Layout Help for Your Specific Design Questions: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites
Altium Audio Bites, giving 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: How to Find The Best PCB Layout Help For Your Specific Design Questions. 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
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How to Prevent Silkscreen Placement Errors in PCB Manufacturing: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites
Altium Audio Bites, giving 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: How To Prevent Silkscreen Placement Errors in PCB Manufacturing. 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
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High Speed PCB Design Guidelines: An Overview for Getting Started
One of the most common questions I receive from new designers and new hardware developers relates to the differences between high-speed digital designs and any other circuit board. Everyone naturally assumes the clock frequency defines the limit where we consider a design to be operating at high speed, but this is not the whole story. High speed designs can be identified by the presence of two common characteristics: The presence of standardized
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How to Optimize Your Design for Product Serviceability
Have you ever gone into a situation thinking that you’re totally prepared, only to come out of it feeling like you are totally clueless? Unfortunately, I have experienced this more times than I would like to recount. This was especially the case when I started designing products for serviceability or design for repair. There are many factors to consider before you decide whether your product should be designed for serviceability, and you should
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PCB Design Guidelines for Designing Solar Powered Embedded Systems
Have you ever gone on a vacation and felt like you needed another one immediately after? I sure do, my last beach holiday was completely ruined by constant thunderstorms. Unpredictable weather always is always a dilemma when I’m planning ahead for my next vacation, especially if it involves outdoor activities. I take the same cautious approach when I’m designing solar-powered embedded systems intended for outdoor applications. It is a totally
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How to Find the Best PCB Layout Help for Your Specific Design Questions
Have you ever heard stories about the gamblers in the Wild West pulling an ace out of their sleeve in order to cash in with the winning hand? Even though it’s not the most moral example I’ve ever used, the principle here is still a good one. Always make sure that you have something in your pocket that you can draw from when you need it. And this is just as important for us as designers as it is in everyday life. At some point, everyone needs help
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High Voltage PCB Design for Arc Prevention: How to Manage Pads and Traces
Growing up, I’d work obsessively on jigsaw puzzles with my grandmother. Like, skipping dinner obsessively. She was a grandmaster of puzzles; you only got to look at the picture once when you took the pieces out. If you needed more than your memory and pattern recognition, that was cheating. Instead of facing the shame of looking at the box, I learned to focus on the shapes of the pieces, and how each fit with its neighbors. That way, not knowing
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How to Reduce Power Consumption in Embedded Systems With Deep Sleep SRAM
Editorial credit: DFree / Shutterstock.com One of my favorite musical groups is the French DJ duo Daft Punk. One of the quirks of Daft Punk is that they pretend to be robots and perform all their shows in awesome robot costumes. In 2013 they released their album Random Access Memories, or RAM, to play on the robotic theme. However, they failed to specify exactly which kind of RAM. You and I know that in the world of embedded systems the type of
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3D PCB Design: Why You Need It and How It Will Help You
The other day I watched as a young father was entertaining his one-year old son on his shoulders. Securely held by his dad, the boy would constantly move from side trying to get different views of his father. In an overload of cuteness, he would first look at his dad over the left side of his face, then play with his hair, move over to the right side, then go back to where he started from. I thoroughly enjoyed watching this precious moment, but
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Why You Should Use PCB Assembly Variants for Multiple Design Configurations
Years ago I was working on a design that had been copied from an existing board, but there was a problem. A few of the circuits on my layout didn’t match what the engineer had in his schematic. This generated a lot of confusion. We eventually tracked the problem down to some edits that had been made to the board after the design had been approved and sent to fabrication. An inadvertent change to the board while creating an assembly variation had
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3D Printing versus Real Time, Pre-Build Clearance Checking
3D printing has been revolutionizing the manufacturing industry. Once you have your completed design, just feed it into your printer and press a button, and it can be fabricated automatically. 3D printing is used for fast and easy prototyping of all sorts of complex and intricate items. So why not use it to fabricate your completed printed circuit board designs? Well, because when it comes to PCBs, there’s a better way. The Problem with 3D
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Top 5 Money Saving Techniques for PCB Design
“It can be done fast, it can be done cheaply, or it can be done well. Pick any two.” A lot of engineers use this maxim to explain why their project is behind schedule or over budget. And there is some degree of truth to it. If you want a high-quality design, it’s either going to take a lot of money or a lot of time to figure out how to do it for less. However, if you know a few money-saving techniques ahead of time, they can help you keep your
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