Best Practices for Using DNI/DNP Entries in Your PCB BOM If you’ve ever looked at the BOM for a reference design or an open-source project, you may have seen a comment in some of the entries in your BOM. This comment is either “DNP” (do not populate) or “DN...
How to Design and Fabricate a 4-Layer PCB Stackup with Altium Designer Every PCB design project starts with a stackup that has clearly defined signal and plane layers. Make sure you choose the right stackup for your design and make sure you design your stackup to comply ...
Follow Mixed Signal PCB Design Guidelines With the Best CAD Tools Mixed-signal PCB design guidelines require satisfying basic digital and analog design rules and preventing signal interference. Mixed-signal boards can be difficult to lay out without the right PCB de...
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...