Workflow Management

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PCB Workflow Management

Using Product Lifecycle Management Software for PCB Design

Using Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Components Software for PCB Design Any product, including circuit boards and electronic components, will become obsolete and must be replaced with completely new versions. If a product is ever manufactured and taken to market, the product and its components will inevitably have a finite life cycle. Products are eventually upgraded to new versions and capabilities or components are added, or they become obsolete and are replaced with completely new circuit designs and technology Read Article

Digital Input Sampling for Embedded Systems in Altium Designer

Digital Input Sampling for Embedded Systems in Altium Designer Whether or not you know it, embedded systems play an important role in providing broad functionality in a number of important applications, ranging from consumer electronics to military and aerospace systems. These systems must often gather analog signals and convert them to digital data, followed by using this data in complex calculations. There is plenty of other functionality to include in these systems in order to make them function as Read Article

Create a Buck-Boost Power Supply

Create a Buck-Boost Power Supply In this series of articles, we’re looking at the design and implementation of the main types of power regulators and converters you might use in an electronics project. I gave a graduate engineer who I mentor a series of requirements to demonstrate each of these types and have recorded the results here so you can work through the same exercises and hopefully come up with the same results. The next switching regulator is the last in our switching Read Article

Assembly: The Last Step In The PCB Product Development Process

Assembly: The Last Step In The PCB Product Development Process As pointed out in previous articles, design is the first step in the PCB product development process, so the board designer needs to understand how the downstream processes will impact his design processes/selections/decisions, and this understanding needs to encompass both technical and financial considerations. These deliberations are viewed and weighted as trade-offs. What might make sense from a technical standpoint may not always make sense Read Article

Build a Buck Converter PCB - Student Project

Build a DC-DC Buck Regulator - Student Project In this article, Mark Harris will go through the implementation of power supplies in a PCB Design project with a student. Curious how it turned out? Read now to learn more. Read Article

Gigabit Ethernet guidelines

Gigabit Ethernet 101: Basics to Implementation This guide is what you are looking for if you’re ready to add ethernet, especially gigabit ethernet, to your electronic circuit design and need to get up to speed. Read Article

How to Build a Circuit Board With Altium’s PCB Design Software

How Are Circuit Boards Made With Altium Designer Your printed circuit board (PCB) design might be designed to work correctly, but you also need to make sure it can actually be manufactured. Although a PCB manufacturer will fabricate and assemble your circuit boards for you, making sure your designs are manufacturable is about encoding DFM specifications in your design rules. With the rule-driven design features of Altium Designer, you can encode DFM specs into your PCB’s design rules; this Read Article

The Best High Speed Design Tools in Altium Designer

The Best High Speed Design Software Tools in Altium Designer Building your next high-speed PCB takes the best design and analysis tools. Your high-speed design tools should make it easy to route connections, place components, and design your stackup in a way that ensures signal integrity and prevents unintended crosstalk. Your analysis tools should help you identify problem areas in your PCB, and your design tools should help you quickly implement redesigns in your PCB. With the high-speed PCB design Read Article

PCB gold traces on polyimide flex materials

PCBs with Gold Traces and Conductors, Now on Flex Materials Flexible polyimide is bio-compatible and critical to many medical applications. Gold PCB traces on flex PCBs provides a fully biocompatible option. Here's how the fabrication process works. Read Article

DIY Vapour Phase Reflow Control Shield

DIY Vapour Phase Reflow Control Shield With all the projects I’ve been working on, I want a better way to do reflow soldering during board assembly than just using a hot air rework station. Initially, I was looking at converting a toaster oven to run picoReflow, and building a Pi Hat for the required electronics but I was finding that a good convection toaster oven on Amazon was starting to look rather expensive for the quality of work it would do. Another factor that I had to Read Article

25 micron trace and space in high density PCB design

High Density PCB Design Game Changer: 25 Micron Trace and Space ‌ Have you heard the latest development in PCB fabrication processes? High density PCB design follows the same trend seen in integrated circuits, where more functionality is packed into a smaller space. The smaller spacing in these boards makes precise manufacturing more difficult, which places important DFM rules on your high density PCB design. Now with the A-SAP™ process, you can place trace widths and spacing down to 1 mil, allowing tight Read Article

Figure of Merit: A Way to Score Your Opinions

Figure of Merit Formula: A Way to Score Your Opinions Metrics are data, and statistically backed measures. It is always expedient to base decisions on data and metrics. But what if a metric doesn’t exist? Then you can create the next best measure: the Figure of Merit. The problem with opinions is that they are difficult to defend, and when used in conjunction with producibility, they often they vary from person to person. That is why the Figure of Merit process is so popular. For a small amount of Read Article

The eSmart Factory Comes to PCB Fabrication

The eSmart Factory Comes to PCB Fabrication We all talk about the Industrial Revolution. The world has gone through a number of “Industrial Revolutions” since the creation of steam power in England. In fact, we talk about three such revolutions since that first one. In the early 2010s, the German Government proposed a fourth industrial revolution they called INDUSTRU 4.0. Today we also call it “The Smart Factory”! But, to date, there hasn’t been too much reported progress in this program Read Article

Design Philosophy in Printed Electronics Manufacturing

Design Philosophy in Printed Electronics Manufacturing In printed electronics, I think about design philosophy from a new perspective. My question about design philosophy is related to printed electronics manufacturing: do I optimize my layout for electrical performance or manufacturability, which may then mean compromises for electrical characteristics? In printed electronics design I need to make trade-offs between trace resistance, voltage levels, power consumption, and layout area. With proper Read Article

65W Single IC LED Driver Project

65W Single IC LED Driver Project One of the projects I’m working on for personal use at the moment is a high color rendering index (CRI) LED panel, which I’m aiming to make about 300W. I was exploring options for making a high-performance LED driver pcb that would be quite compact, and while I couldn’t build a 300W single IC LED driver, I was able to design a 65W one that didn’t look like it would melt right through the circuit board. See more Altium Projects or read more by Read Article

A Comparison of NVIDIA’s Embedded AI Computing Platform Options

A Comparison of NVIDIA’s Embedded AI Computing Platform Options Each new embedded AI computing platform blurs the lines between man and machine... When I first got started with machine learning applications, specifically text classification and sentiment analysis, I was working with an eCommerce client building everything onto a web server. Given the huge amount of data we continue working with on a daily basis, it only made sense to build our platform on a dedicated server. For some AI applications Read Article

Altium 365: The New Frontier of Collaborative Cloud-Enabled Electronics Realization

Altium 365: The New Frontier of Collaborative Cloud-Enabled Electronics Realization In this interview, we talk with Leigh Gawne, Chief Software Architect at Altium, to learn about Altium 365 and the impact he foresees that Cloud-enabled electronics realization will have on Design Engineers--as well as the entire industry. (To see Leigh Gawne and team collaboratively design a board LIVE in Altium 365 at this year’s AltiumLive conference, watch this video). Judy Warner: Leigh, please tell our readers about your background and your Read Article