News & Updates
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Best Practices for Electronics Project Management - Part 2
Part 2 of this series covers essential project management techniques for electronics design teams. Rafał Stępień discusses effective data organization, revision control, and collaboration strategies to improve efficiency and minimize errors.
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Rigid-Flex PCBs: Understanding the Pros, Cons, and Fabrication Considerations
Read our new article which discusses the advantages of rigid-flex PCBs, such as space-saving designs and enhanced reliability, while also addressing potential challenges in their fabrication. It provides essential design and manufacturing tips to help engineers effectively implement this technology in various applications.
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The Role of Automation & Robotics in Wire Harness Assembly
Our new article highlights how automation and robotics are transforming wire harness assembly, improving efficiency, precision, and cost-effectiveness. Technologies like robotic wire handling and AI-driven testing are paving the way for smarter production. However, challenges like custom designs and high costs still persist.
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Best Practices for Electronics Project Management - Part 1
Check out the first part of "Best Practices for Electronics Project Management" by Rafał Stępień. It offers valuable advice on enhancing team communication and documentation in hardware design projects.
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Wiring for the Final Frontier: A Guide to Space-Grade Harness Design
Wiring harnesses are mission-critical in space systems, requiring strict adherence to ECSS-Q-ST-70-61C and NASA-STD-8739.4A. In "Wiring for the Final Frontier: A Guide to Space-Grade Harness Design", Kamil Jasiński explores key design principles, material selection, and testing to ensure reliability in extreme environments.
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The Future of Wire Harnesses in the Electric Vehicle and Electronics Era
Discover how wire harnesses are evolving to meet the demands of electric vehicles and modern electronics. Our latest article explores key trends like higher voltages, lightweight designs, and smart harnesses, along with challenges such as cost and supply chain issues.
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Mastering EMI Control in PCB Design: Decoupling Strategies for PDN
Dario Fresu explores effective decoupling strategies for power distribution networks (PDNs) to minimize EMI in PCB designs. The article covers techniques like decoupling capacitors and power planes to ensure stable power delivery for integrated circuits.
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Building Your Own Android Device with a Raspberry Pi
Learn how to turn a Raspberry Pi into a custom Android device. This guide covers hardware selection, software setup, and troubleshooting common issues.
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How PCB Design Engineers Can Securely Share Design Files with External Teams
Learn how PCB design engineers can securely share design files with team members, clients, and manufacturers. Marek Orzeł explores best practices and tools to protect your intellectual property while ensuring efficient collaboration.
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OEMs and Harness Manufacturers: Building Strong Collaboration for Success
Strong partnerships between OEMs and harness manufacturers are key to efficient, high-quality product development. In this article, Krishna Sundaram shows how collaboration, clear communication, and the right design tools can streamline the harness manufacturing process and drive success.
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Ebook: Routing High-Density Interconnects with Reliable Microvias
HDI PCBs take a particular approach to routing interconnects through multiple layers to ensure reliability during fabrication, assembly, and operation. The critical structure that enables this is microvias, which are prone to failure if not designed properly. In this e-book, readers will receive an initial look at the reasons microvia reliability has come into the spotlight and why HDI PCB designers put reliability first when routing through microvias.
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IPC-2221 Calculator for PCB Trace Current and Heating
Aside from impedance and annular ring calculations, one of the other major formulas specified in the IPC 2221 standard relates temperature rise, trace width, and trace current. THere is also the IPC-2152 standard, both include this guidance on designing for thermal reliability, but which standard should we use?
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Stripline Impedance Calculator
Striplines provide some advantages over microstrips as they take advantage of natural shielding and coupling from nearby ground plane layers. Although they tend to experience higher losses due to total confinement in the dielectric, they can be thinner due to the high dielectric constant used in internal layers of a PCB. Use our free impedence calculator to help you determine the correct width needed to hit a target impedance.
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Which Types of Opto-Isolators Are Right For Your Signal?
An optoisolator is a cool electronic device that can be used to pass information between a diode without passing an electrical current. There are many great applications for these, but do you know which one is right for you?
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Properties panel document options in SCH editors
The Properties panel provides access to the properties of documents and objects. The contents of the panel change depending on the active document or the selected object. This blog will quickly go over some of need to know options around the properties panel in the schematic document.
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The High-Speed PCB Stackup Design Challenge
Even with all the good guidelines out there for high speed design, there are particular aspects of stackup construction and their relation to building boards that get overlooked. This blog is goes beyond just the typical SI/PI guidelines and looks at these problems from more of an engineering perspective.
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Everything You Need to Know About Stitching Vias
Stitching vias are something you often see spread around the surface layer of a PCB, but what are they? and should you be using them? In this guide, we'll go over some of the standard uses of stitching vias and when they should be used in a PCB.
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PCB Stackup Basics
In comparison to the build-up of a PCB, the stackup is more concerned with the electrical type of each layer, that is are we working with signals, power, or ground. Continue reading to learn how you can optimize your layer stack.
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Multi-board and Harness Design Capability in Altium Designer 23
Altium’s VP of marketing Lawrence Romine discusses the multi-board and harness design capabilities coming in Altium Designer 23.
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Controlled ESR Capacitors: Should You Use Them for Power Integrity?
Controlled ESR capacitors are important for power integrity in your design as they can help smooth out the PDN impedance spectrum in your high speed PCB.
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How Does the Package PDN Impact Power Integrity?
Whenever we say something to the effect of “components can’t work without a correctly designed PCB,” we only have to look at component packaging for evidence. It is true that component packages come with parasitics that affect signal integrity, but there is one area that we don’t often look at in terms of component packaging: power integrity.
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Designing Custom Hardware with Microcontrollers
In this article, we’ll look at all that is required to start creating your own custom microcontroller-based hardware designs. You’ll see that there actually isn’t too much to this, as microcontroller manufacturers over the years have tried to make the learning curve less steep and their devices more, and more accessible. This is both from an electrical point of view but also – equally importantly – from a programming point of view.
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Guide to Low-Dk PCB Materials
If you’ve taken time to learn about PCB material options and layer constructions, you have probably seen the wide range of materials that are available on the market. Materials companies produce laminates with varying Dk values, Tg values, weave styles, CTI values, and mechanical properties to target various applications in the electronics industry.
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Designing for V2X Communication: Wireless Protocols and Standards
If you’re waiting for truly connected cars on a grand scale, there is still a massive amount of work to be done, both on the hardware and software sides. Connected cars can only become a widespread reality once the automotive industry and telecom carriers can decide which protocol will work best for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. PCB designers will then need to step in to create these systems and fit them into a vehicular environment.
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Everything You Need to Know About Stitching Vias
This one area of PCB design can be contentious among some designers as it is related to copper pour, which it is often stated is not needed in most designs. Regardless of your feelings about copper pour, stitching vias have important uses in PCBs at low frequencies and at high frequencies.
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IPC-2221 Calculator for PCB Trace Current and Heating
The IPC-2221 standard includes many requirements for printed circuit board design and manufacturability, and there are several online calculators that have been developed based on this standard.
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