Results
As data rates increase, the risks hidden in your layout grow with them. This quick guide highlights the critical SI checkpoints that can save you from late-stage surprises and redesigns. If you design high-speed boards, you’ll want to read this before your next review.
Don’t walk into supplier talks blind. Use market data to benchmark quotes, check lead times and uncover alternate parts. This article shows how visibility can shift the balance and de-risk your BOM.
Designing rigid-flex boards is like solving a 3D puzzle of materials, bends and tight spaces, and via-in-pad might just be the piece you need. Dive into how and when to use via-in-pad in rigid-flex designs, and what to watch out for from fabrication to field reliability.
This whitepaper examines how next-generation wearable electronics are evolving through advancements in flexible and rigid-flex design, smart materials, AI, energy innovations, and connectivity. Discover what’s required to transform early prototypes into scalable, reliable products across healthcare, sports, defense, fashion, and enterprise applications.
Electronic parts may now cycle from launch to end-of-life in just a few years, but many systems are expected to serve for 10–20+ years. Here’s how to build a component selection process that aligns engineering, procurement and design for longevity and stability.
As component lead-times extend and obsolescence becomes a persistent threat, PCB projects demand more than schematic capture and layout tools alone. This article details how ECAD software with embedded supply-chain intelligence can: unify engineering and procurement teams; provide visibility into stock levels, lead times and alternates; and enable proactive risk mitigation within the design loop.
In complex electronic systems, managing data from multiple printed circuit boards can quickly become a logistical challenge. This article outlines a structured workflow for handling both board-level and assembly-level design outputs, ensuring clarity and consistency across fabrication, assembly and product-level documentation.
Learn the six essential topics every electronics team should address in design reviews to improve quality, avoid surprises and bring products to market faster.
I can’t think of a single product I’ve built that doesn’t require capacitors. We often talk a lot about effective series inductance (ESL) in capacitors and its effects on power integrity. What about effective series resistance (ESR)? Is there a technique you can use to determine the appropriate level of resistance, and can you use ESR to your advantage?
If your goal is to hit a target impedance, and you’re worried about how nearby pour might affect impedance, you can get closer than the limits set by the 3W rule. But what are the effects on losses? If the reason for this question isn’t obvious, or if you’re not up-to-date on the finer points of transmission line design, then keep reading to see how nearby ground pour can affect losses in impedance-controlled interconnects.
If you need to capture sound waves for your electrical device to process, you'll need a microphone. However, microphones these days have become very advanced, and there are so many options to choose from. They range from the relatively simple and popular condenser type microphones to state-of-the-art sound conversion solutions incorporating internal amplifiers and other electronic processing functionality. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the options available.
There are many times where you need an amplifier with high gain, low noise, high slew rate, and broad bandwidth simultaneously. However, not all of these design goals are possible with all off-the-shelf components. Here are some points to consider when working with a composite amplifier design and how to evaluate your design with the right set of circuit simulation tools.
Simple switching regulator circuits that operate in compact spaces, like on a small PCB, can usually be deployed in noisy environments without superimposing significant noise on the output power level. As long as you lay out the board properly, you’ll probably only need a simple filter circuit to remove EMI on the inputs and outputs. As the regulator becomes larger, both physically and electrically, noise problems can become much more apparent, namely radiated EMI and conducted EMI in the PCB layout.
A PCB design review is a practice to review the design of a board for possible errors and issues at various stages of product development. It can range from a formal checklist with official sign-offs to a more free-form inspection of schematic drawings and PCB layouts. For this article, we will not delve into what to check during a design review process but rather look at how a review process itself usually unfolds and how to optimize it to get the most out of your time.
As we established in Part 1, the PCB design review and collaboration practices have room for improvement in many organizations. To address this, we developed Altium 365. Let's examine how running a PCB project through Altium 365 compares to other methods.
If you look on the internet, you'll find some interesting grounding recommendations, and sometimes terminology gets thrown around and applied to a PCB without the proper context or understanding of real electrical behavior. DC recommendations get applied to AC, low current gets applied to high current, and vice versa... the list goes on. One of the more interesting grounding techniques you'll see as a recommendation, including on some popular engineering blogs within the industry, is the use of PCB star grounding.
Every PCB has silkscreen on the surface layer, and you’ll see a range of alphanumeric codes, numbers, markings, and logos on PCB silkscreen. What exactly does it all mean, and what specifically should you include in your silkscreen layer? All designs are different, but there are some common pieces of information that will appear in any silkscreen in order to aid assembly, testing, debug, and traceability
Designing high-speed channels on complex boards requires simulations, measurements on test boards, or both to ensure the design operates as you intend. Gibbs ringing is one of these effects that can occur when calculating a channel’s response using band-limited network parameters. Just as is the case in measurements, Gibbs ringing can occur in channel simulations due to the fact that network parameters are typically band-limited.
In electronics, there is the possibility that your PCB can get pretty hot due to power dissipation in certain components. There are many things to consider when dealing with heat in your board, and it starts with determining power dissipation in your design during schematic capture. If you happen to be operating within safe limits in a high power device, you might need an SMD heat sink on certain components. Ultimately, this could save your components, your product, and even the operator.
One thing is certain: power supply designs can get much more complex than simply routing DC power lines to your components. RF power supply designs require special care to ensure they will function without transferring excessive noise between portions of the system, something that is made more difficult due to the high power levels involved. In addition to careful layout, circuitry needs to be designed such that the system provides highly efficient power conversion and delivery to each subsection of the system.
Overvoltage, overcurrent, and heat are the three most likely events that can destroy our expensive silicon-based components or reduce our product’s life expectancy. The effects are often quite instant, but our product might survive several months of chronic overstress before giving up the ghost in some cases. Without adequate protection, our circuit can be vulnerable to damage, so what should we do? Or do we need to do anything?
Today’s PCB designers and layout engineers often need to put on their simulation hat to learn more about the products they build. When you need to perform simulations, you need models for components, and simulation models often need to be shared with other team members at the project level or component level. What’s the best way for Altium Designer users to share this data? Read this article to learn more about sharing your models with other design participants.
When some designers start talking materials, they probably default to FR4 laminates. The reality is there are many FR4 materials, each with relatively similar structure and a range of material property values. Designs on FR4 are quite different from those encountered at the low GHz range and mmWave frequencies. So what exactly changes at high frequencies, and what makes these materials different? To see just what makes a specific laminate useful as an RF PCB material, take a look at our guide below.
In today’s fast-paced world where iterations of electronics are spun at lightning speeds, we often forget one of the most critical aspects of development: testing. Even if we have that fancy test team, are we really able to utilize them for every modification, every small and insignificant change that we make to our prototypes? In this article, we will review a very low cost, yet highly effective and quite exhaustive test system that will get you that bang for your buck that you’ve been looking for.
