design

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA)® announced their honorees for the 2014 Best of Innovations Design and Engineering Awards. The awards honor outstanding design and engineering advancements across 28 consumer electronics product categories.

The board stackup is probably the most essential piece for ensuring a successful PCB design. Modern high-speed busses require controlled-impedance traces, and whether you are using a simulation tool, a simple calculator, or the back of a napkin, you need to understand your manufacturing process to correlate your impedance calculations. This ensures that your trace widths and dielectric heights match what will actually be manufactured, and eliminates last-minute design changes.

Military EMC design can be particularly vexing. Multiple environments combined with multiple threats lead to multiple requirements. The threat levels, and the resulting requirements, are usually more stringent than found in the commercial world.