The Anatomy of Your Schematic Netlist, Ports, and Net Names Take a moment to think about your schematic and your PCB layout: what if you had to manually draw out wires and nets in a PCB after you’ve already created them in the schematic? Electronics schematics...
Taking a Modular PCB Design Approach in Altium Designer PCB design is rarely discussed in terms of designing functional blocks or as connecting modules with different functionality. Simple designs can usually be designed without considering how your PCB la...
The Best Multilayer PCB Design Tips for Circuit Board Layout Doing something new for the first time can be difficult. Baby birds probably don’t appreciate being pushed out of the nest and teenagers are nervous before their first real date. I, personally, was sc...
Should You Route Signals in Your PCB Power Plane? I often get questions from designers asking about things like signal integrity and power integrity, and this most recent question forced me to think (again!) about some basic routing practices near pl...
Using SDRAM vs. DDR RAM in Your PCB Design Embedded computers, vision devices, DAQ modules, and much more will all need some memory, whether it’s a Flash chip or a RAM module. Normally, something like a Flash memory chip or a small eMMC module...
Overlapping Planes in Your Mixed-Signal PCB Layout Power planes, or at least polygon pour used for power, are indispensable in modern PCBs, and it’s doubtful that digital systems as we know them would exist without the ability to split power nets into...
How Total Harmonic Distortion Affects Your Power System It would be nice if, at least in the US, the power that came from the wall was truly noise free. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and although a power system can appear to output a clean sine wave...
Designing 5G Devices The next stage in the evolution of mobile telephony is here with the roll-out of 5G. The designer looking to incorporate functionality to handle 5G signals into their circuits will face some challengi...
Understanding Ground Planes in Your Two-Layer PCB Back when I was a young and hungry grad student, my first PCB ground plane design was used to collect analog signals from several sensors. When looking at a voltage graph of my measurements, the noise...
Complete Guide to PCB Aging Test Methods A finished PCBA that will be deployed in the field should pass several tests to ensure reliability and stable operation. Industry standards specify multiple testing methodologies, performance requirem...
EMI Shielding Techniques You Can Use in Your PCB Design Software Electromagnetic interference (EMI) is such a problem that governments around the world have placed limits on the amount of EMI an electronic device is allowed to generate or receive. Your electronic d...
What is RF Circuit Design? Digital systems designers are likely familiar with some RF components and routing styles, but there is much more that goes into RF circuit design. An RF circuit can include integrated circuits, discre...