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Thought Leadership
Designing Pressure Tolerant Electronics: It's All About Mechanics
After a recent inquiry from a customer about a high power board that must withstand high gas pressures, my team suddenly realized we needed to do some research on designing pressure tolerant electronics. This area is not as popular as designing electronics for ambient pressures, but the design techniques used here enable important scientific expeditions and industrial applications in high pressure environments. Whether the board will be placed in
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High Voltage SMPS PCB Layout to Minimize Heat and Noise
Whether you are performing AC-DC conversion or DC-DC conversion, switching power supply layouts are common in high voltage design and must be constructed carefully. Although this system is quite common, it will easily radiate EMI due to the fast changes in voltage and current during switching. Designers can rarely adapt existing designs into new systems as a minor change in one area can create an EMI problem that is difficult to diagnose. With
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How to Select an Inductor for a Buck Converter
An SMPS is one of those quiet (yet electrically noisy) devices that makes your favorite electronics run smoothly. They sit in the background quietly doing their duty, yet your board wouldn’t operate without them. As part of DC-DC converter design for power-hungry applications, component selection is quite important for ensuring stable power delivery to a load with high efficiency. Among the numerous DC-DC converter topologies, a buck converter
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How to Design Your PCB Test Coupon and What You Can Test
As the operating speed of components has increased, controlled impedance is becoming more common in digital, analog, and mixed-signal systems. If the controlled impedance value for an interconnect is incorrect, it can be very difficult to identify this problem during an in-circuit test. Minor mismatches may not cause a board to fail, but it can be difficult to pinpoint incorrect impedance as the cause of any test failure, especially if correct
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Driving Haptic Vibration and Feedback in Wearables
Augmented reality, virtual surgery, limb replacements, medical devices, and other new technologies need to incorporate haptic vibration motors and feedback to give the wearer a full sense of how they are interacting with their environment. Unless these cutting-edge applications include haptic vibration and feedback, users are forced to rely on their other four senses to understand the real or virtual environment. Low cost components to support
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Modeling Copper Foil Roughness in Altium Designer's Impedance Profiler
Advanced transmission line models for long interconnects require that designers include copper foil roughness calculations in order to determine accurate impedance. Without the right models or design software, you’ll be left to estimate the skin effect impedance, dispersion, and parasitics in your PCB. These models can be difficult to work with by hand if you’re not mathematically inclined, but the right design tools can be used to quickly
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High-Speed Signal Routing: The 5 Important PCB Design Constraints
Your modern digital board is most likely classified as high speed, regardless of whether you looked at the datasheets for your components. Designing your board successfully will take some important steps when you begin your design. Aside from floorplanning and stackup design, your routing strategy will need to operate within some important PCB design constraints. After you capture your schematic as an initial layout and create an initial
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How to Reduce Clock and Signal Jitter: Debugging Power Supply Noise
Low level components need ultra-stable power, and high speed digital signals need to have repeatable edge transition times. The two aspects of digital signalling are related, and you’ll need to suppress all aspects of power supply noise to reduce jitter in a digital system. During a design debug, you’ll need to gather measurements throughout your board if you want to isolate and eliminate sources of power supply noise. Here’s how you can isolate
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PCB Trace and Pad Clearance: Low vs. High Voltage
High voltage/high current designs carry safety requirements that need to be met by designers. Similarly, high-speed designs need to have suppressed crosstalk in order to ensure signal integrity. The key design aspects that relate to both areas are your PCB trace clearance and pad clearance values. These design choices are critical for balancing safety, noise suppression, and manufacturability. The IPC 2221 voltage and spacing standards provide
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PCB Via Current-Carrying Capacity: Is My PCB Too Hot?
What does PCBA too hot mean? It's a common question from designers, particularly new designers that are learning about industry standards, and refers to the PCB via current-carrying capacity of conductors. Trace and via current-carrying capacity are legitimate design points to focus on when designing a new board that will carry high current. The goal is to keep conductor temperatures below some appropriate limit, which then helps keep components
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Amplifier Stability at High Frequencies and Stray Capacitance
Amplifiers are one of those critical components that make modern life possible. From wireless communication to power electronics, amplifiers need to run stably and predictably for these products to work properly. Stability analysis is one of my favorite topics in physics and engineering, and it always tends to crop up in places you would least expect. One of these places is in amplifiers. Any time-dependent physical system with feedback and gain
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Near-field and Far-field EMI: What's Causing Noise Problems in My PCB?
If you’re an antenna designer, then you’re likely familiar with all aspects of near-field vs. far-field radiation. Given the litany of radiated EMI problems that cause noise within and outside of an electronic device, one might suddenly realize their new product is acting like a strong antenna. To understand how EMI affects your circuits, it helps to understand exactly how near-field vs. far-field radiation from your PCB affects your ability to
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How to Use Blind and Buried Vias in Altium Designer
The old adage of not being able to cram 10 pounds of whatever into a 5 pound bag is especially true when it comes to routing traces on a PCB design. Unfortunately this demand seems to be the norm anymore; everyone these days wants to increase the density of designs or reduce their form factor, or both! One way that you can help yourself is to use blind and buried vias when routing. These vias will open up a host of new routing options as you will
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Printed Circuit Board Design Software that is Productive and Painless to Use
When I was young, a new hospital was built in my community. It was easy to get to and provided a great service. Over the years however, the hospital has grown and added more clinics and services. To accommodate this growth the property has been drastically altered for the construction of buildings and parking lots. Now there are narrow driveways, reduced parking, and areas blocked off by cement barricades. If new equipment is being delivered as
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The EMC Doctor is in: Ken Wyatt on EMI and PCB Health
The OnTrack Podcast welcomes Ken Wyatt (also known as ‘the EMC Doctor’). Ken is an EMC Engineer, a prolific author on EMI/EMC related topics, and an industry consultant.
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Differential Pair Length Matching: Best Practices for Signal Integrity
Take two signals and send them down a parallel bus or differential pair. How can you be sure the downstream receiver will latch to your signals? If your signals don’t arrive at the same place and at the same time, then gates in your receiver won’t latch at just the right moment. This delicate balance can be like walking a tightrope across a cliff, and it can be difficult to maintain differential pair length matching by eyeing your trace lengths
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How to Perform Differential Pair Tuning in Altium Designer
In order to properly suppress common-mode noise, differential pairs should be routed in parallel with symmetry and matched lengths. Today's CAD tools make it easy to come close to all three objectives, but only if you have the right design tools. Instead of eyeing out your different pair lengths, the interactive routing tools in Altium Designer make differential pair length matching easy. You can encode permissible length mismatches as design
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