Make your Product Fit that Unusual Shape

Adopt the SMART rules of PCB Data Management and avoid additional cost and/or lost design time. When we begin to look in more detail at how to do anything, it becomes a little problematic. The reason is that every organization varies in product, structure and management requirements. We can guarantee that there will not be a “single” answer or solution to the questions at hand. My intention therefore is not to prescribe a sole structure or

“You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.” ― Steve Jobs That is some great advice, from a leader in the industry. I would expound on his thought, that it really doesn’t matter how qualified an individual is. They could have gone to the best schools got the best degrees possible. IF… they do not have the correct tools to do the job. The result is an absolute travesty for the company and for the

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