John Watson on Draftsman Sheets

Getting through the PCB design and development stage is always cause for celebration. You just cleared through the last PCB documentation and fabrication project hurdles, whether it was securing quantities for new components, finalizing environmental testing, or getting that green light from your EMC (Electromagnetic Compliance) engineer. Your PCB project is now in the “released” status with all approval signatures in place, and it’s time to hand

The IPC-2221 standard provides guidance on trace current limit calculations for a given temperature rise limit.

An IPC-2221 calculator helps ensure your next high voltage design has the right trace spacing. In this latest PCB design expert blog, we’ve compiled some important results here for your convenience.

It’s essential to check a board for issues before production or prototyping. Here’s an extensive checklist you can adapt or use directly for PCB design review.

The holiday season is coming! I asked both the Altium community and my Altium Library community what geek gifts they are looking for, and I’ve added some of my own for the first ever Altium Geek Gift Guide! This is mostly for electronics geeks, but there should be something for everyone! There are so many amazing geek gifts out there it would be impossible to cover them all, so I’ve tried to keep to community suggestions. I then added just a few

The relative permittivity of water makes this pencil appear bent If you’ve paid attention to refraction, then you know something about the physics of relative permittivity. The semiconductor industry has managed to continue scaling to smaller technology nodes by using materials with high dielectric constant (so-called high-k dielectrics), but can you see similar benefits in your PCB with similar substrate materials? What about the use of low-k

I recently worked with a customer who had to generate a nonstandard pick and place file because his assembly house was using antiquated equipment and could not accept a standard Altium pick and place file. I though it might be helpful to show how to use the Bill of Material generator within Altium to create a custom report to meet such needs. The procedure is quite simple. The first step is to open the Bill of Materials dialog and drag the

For as long as PCB designers have used CAD tools to design their circuit boards, they have also had to create output files from those CAD tools to get the design manufactured. This used to be a time-consuming task involving a lot of manual intervention. You would have to create several related documents in addition to the data files, and perhaps even use a different design tool to create manufacturing drawings. Anymore though, the process of

I was asked recently by a relatively new engineer what files I send to an assembler to make sure they do not encounter problems, and what would reduce the number of clarification questions they ask about the design. That engineer had been working professionally for several years with a large company, and had never had the responsibility of generating outputs or even seen the outputs from the products he was working on, so his only experience was

Learn how to successfully engineer the power delivery system design so it meets the needs of new technologies.