OnTrack: The PCB Design Podcast

Dive into the future of collaborative PCB design with Altium's latest feature, the PCB CoDesign tool in AD24! In this exciting episode of the Altium OnTrack Podcast, our host, Zach Peterson, sits down with Wojciech Łaś, Product Manager at Altium, to explore the ins and outs of this innovative tool.

Discover how the PCB CoDesign tool allows multiple designers to work on the same PCB layout simultaneously, extending Altium's version control system. Learn about the compare and merge tool, a game-changer for detecting, comparing, and resolving conflicts in PCB layout files. Wojciech shares insights into the challenges of coordinating work among multiple designers and strategies to optimize the collaborative workflow.

Get a sneak peek into the future roadmap, including upcoming features like merge requests and improved conflict prevention. Find out how Altium's approach differs from real-time collaboration tools and the advantages of asynchronous collaboration.

Whether you're a seasoned Altium user or exploring the world of collaborative PCB design, this podcast provides valuable insights and a glimpse into the future of electronic design.a

Join us as we reflect on the best moments and the coolest guests we've had on the OnTrack podcast this year. 2012 has been a whirlwind year for the electronics industry–chip shortages, and a supply chain crunch. Altium has passed several milestones, as well as releasing an education program. And there have been some groundbreaking reports from industry groups highlighting the need for workforce training and development, and workforce shortages coming on the horizon.

Watch the episode here

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Show Highlights:

• One of Altium’s Milestone is the Altium Education Program
• In most of the episodes, the issue of automotive chips shortage comes up coupled with the passing of the PCB Act
• PCB Packaging, and production of integrated circuit substrates 
• Most requested repeat guests and new faces

Links and Resources:

• Watch all the OnTrack Podcast Episode
• Register at Altium Education for Free
• Connect with Zach on LinkedIn
• Visit Nexar website
• Visit Octopart website

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It’s that time again to have Altium’s VP of Marketing, Lawrence Romine, the bearer of good news when it comes to Altium Designer’s latest features. We will discuss what’s coming in Altium Designer 23 which includes multi-board and harness design capabilities.

You don’t want to miss this one. Watch through the end and be sure to check the show notes and additional resources below.

Watch this episode here

Show Highlights

• Altium Designer®’s regular and reliable updates are incomparable in the industry, stay on top of the monthly updates through the OnTrack newsletter
• There are 3 major themes to come in Altium Designer 2023
  • Multi-board systems and harness design – empower PCB designers and electrical engineers to design harnesses
  • Collaboration and teamwork
  • Make Altium Designer a necessity for every PCB designer – the world's greatest and most elegant design experience
• Code Designer, coming soon – the ability to work natively in Altium Designer and in Mcad tool of choice
• Multi-board and harness design capability, Altium Designer is fully supported through Altium 365
• It's never too soon to involve the other stakeholders in your PCB design
  • Altium 365 releases commenting capability to both bombs and draftsman documents
• New power analysis capability powered by Keysight, anybody that can design a printed circuit board can now do some power analysis
• Altium Designer users are encouraged to check out all of the extensions, especially the new power analyzer

Links and Resources:

Connect with Lawrence Romine on LinkedIn

• Stay on top of Altium Designer versions updates
• What’s new in Altium 365
• Read: Come See the New Power Analyzer by Keysight in Altium Designer 22.9
• Connect with Zach on LinkedIn
• Visit Nexar website
• Visit Octopart website

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Build and develop workflow in a "lightweight" way.

Kyle Dumont and Valentina Toll Villagra, the founders of AllSpice are passionate about taking hardware development to speed through the cloud. Their ultimate goal is to bring people together, bring the system together, and automate repetitive processes. Watch or listen on the go. You don't want to miss this.

Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics

Watch the video, click here. 

Show Highlights:

• Introductions
  • Kyle Dumont’s background in product development
  • Valentina Toll Villagra background in Mechanical Engineering at Amazon -- machinery and logistics
• How Allspice got started?
  • Kyle’s experience as an electrical engineer -- software principles applied to hardware
  • Improve the product cycle
  • Keeping up with the change in speed and expectations
  • The need to build a dedicated and specific tool that will allow engineers to collaborate remotely
  • Why the name ‘AllSpice’
• Software-driven Hardware Development: What do you mean??
  • Hardware (HW) today is what Software (SW) was ten years ago (in-person design review)
  • SW is having a growing influence on HW development
    • Shared practices, tools, timelines, etc.
    • Need for integrated development.
• Immediate application/solution: Component Shortages 
  • Replacing components takes more than updating a part number
  • It’s more important than ever to validate components quickly and effectively. 
  • Our most successful customers use an 8-step process (read the blog post)
    1. BOM Check
    2. Identifying OOS components
    3. Finding a replacement
    4. Updating the component library, and the design 
    5. Validating the component characteristics
    6. Verifying component footprints
    7. Checking for unintended changes - this is the one that gets you
    8. Releasing the updated design
  • Providing flexible development infrastructure
• Moving things digitally--in the cloud
  • Teams are more distributed (geographically and in terms of skills)
  • Faster design cycles 
    • What’s driving faster design cycles?
    • What is the impact? (New requirements/old tools and methods)
  • AllSpice Hub features that we didn’t anticipate
• Where are we going...Continuous Integration, bring people together, bring the system together, and automate repetitive processes

Links and Resources:

Visit AllSpice Website
Kyle’s LinkedIn profile
Valentina’s LinkedIn profile
AllSpice’s LinkedIn page
Read the blog: Keeping up with the Chip Shortage
Demo design review

Full OnTrack Podcast Library
Altium Website
Download your Altium Designer Free Trial
Learn More about Altium Nexus

 

Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics

In this episode, Altium’s Technical Consultant, Zach Peterson will share his insights about the availability and accessibility of education related to PCB design for high school and university students.

Zach will also talk about the inspiration behind “Design Secrets,” his new series available on Altium Academy Youtube Channel.

Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics

Watch the video, click here.

Show Highlights:

• Introduction, from academia and Ph.D. in Physics, how did he land in the world of PCB?
• On Altium Academy YouTube channel, Zach offers basic PCB design courses. that are not frequently available, even to professionals.
• Zach’s experience in university: Observations, Knowledge Gaps, what are the main focuses?
• Zach thoughts on why are PCB design courses are not the main focus of education in college and university
  • The challenges in semiconductor industry
  • Focus on digital and analog design
• Zach’s Industry “awakening”—noticed the “graying of PCB design expertise demographic”
• Industry Problems: De-siloing, systems-based thinking—tools, engineering and the rise of digitization
• Need for the industry to “step up” to help equip and prepare for next-gen engineers
• How can companies educate next-gen design engineers in an ecosystem-based context 
• Industry de-siloing leads to educational de-siloing
• Zach and his company’s contribution to these efforts? 
• Checkout Zach’s Blogs in Altium’s Resource hub
• What is Upverter education and watch for the future university content
• Altium full-time education team, free licenses, IPC, PCEA

Links and Resources:

Zachariah Peterson Video series on Altium Academy YouTube Channel
Upverter Education Website
Signal Integrity Journal--Zachariah Peterson Articles 
How to Achieve Proper Grounding
#PCBeTheChange Design Contest | Upverter Education
 

Full OnTrack Podcast Library
Altium Website
Download your Altium Designer Free Trial
Learn More about Altium Nexus

Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics

AltiumLive 2022 and IPC Apex 2022 are joining forces to bring together all stakeholders in the PCB industry.

We have two executives joining us in this episode. Our very own Chief Ecosystem Officer and head of Altium Nexar, Ted Pawela; and IPC’s Vice President of Standards and Technology, Dave Bergman. They will share with us some exciting news about the most anticipated exhibits in the PCB community.

Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics

Watch the video, click here.

Show Highlights:

• Introductions:
  • Ted Pawela, the Chief Ecosystem Officer and Head of Cloud (Nexar) Business Unit at Altium
  • Dave Bergman, the Vice President Standards and Technology at IPC
• IPC and Altium Live conferences co-locate
  • Uniting the stakeholders: PCB Design, PCB Manufacturing, PCB Supply Chain
  • IPC leadership role in the industry⁠— providing standards and educational foundation
  • Bringing and exposing the PCB Designers to additional valuable education
• Dates of conferences and where overlap opportunities will be offered
  • IPC Apex 2022: January 25th - 27th in San Diego with the theme “Digital Transcendence”
  • AltiumLive 2022: January 26th - 28th in San Diego with the theme: “Connect”
• The intersection between the 2 conferences
  • The relevance and synergies of ecosystems and community engagement
  • Education strategies from Altium, IPC, and places of interest to intersect
  • Understanding what’s beyond the tools
  • Advancing the PCB designers’ careers through education
  • IPC serves as a validation of the designers’ skills and talent through CID and CID+ training.
• IPC Foundation
• Why should you attend, what opportunities are there for you?
  • User-centric
  • Learn from the pure hard work of subject matter experts
  • Improve design skills and connect with the people in the community
• Experience the biggest and the best, see you in January 2022

Links and Resources:

AltiumLive 2022 Website
IPC Apex Expo 2022
IPC CID Training (Eptac)
Altium Academy YouTube Channel
IPC Edge Educational Resources

Full OnTrack Podcast Library
Altium Website
Download your Altium Designer Free Trial
Learn More about Altium Nexus

 

Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics

Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics

Watch the video, click here.

Show Highlights:

• Understanding Semi Additive Process (SAP) and Modified Semi Additive Process (MSAP)
• MSAP isn’t new, but it’s growing to adoption, what’s driving that?
• What makes MSAP especially applicable now?
• Benefits of Laser Direct Imaging (LDI) for PCB designers and manufacturers
  • What are the design implications and benefits? What exactly can you do with it?
• The methods/materials used for this technology?
  • Chemical Technology, Averatec
  • Ultra-thin copper, Insulectro

Links and Resources:

Insulectro Webinar on MSAP
Insulectro Website
(Insulectro Webinars Library available near the bottom of their homepage)
Chris Hunrath LinkedIn profile
Averatek Podcast on Additive Manufacturing

 

Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics

What’s in your soft skill toolbox? Eli Hughes is a true full-stack hardware engineer and a co-founder of Tzero Brew. He joins the OnTrack podcast to share his insights on how to foster innovation, manage upstream failure, build trust with your fellow engineers and stakeholders, and develop your soft skills—and other non-technical skills we use to communicate with each other and solve problems effectively. 

Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics

Watch the video, click here.

Show Highlights:

• Intro to Eli
• Meeting the challenges of working remotely
• A lesson in engineering from a kindergartener
• ”Soft skills for hardware”; humanity in engineering 
• Timing and Perception: Shifting targets as customer needs change
• Too easy to be negative; finding positivity in global challenges
• How constraints foster innovation
• Wants vs Needs: building trust with fellow developers
• Jeremy Blum’s take on ‘Empathic Engineering’
• You make it, you fix it: managing upstream failure
• Believing in the Mission: how ordinary people do extraordinary things
• The Part vs the Whole: Lee Ritchey’s homemade Apollo 11 boards
• Elon Musk & Tony Stark: the power of unification
• Expanding your sphere of influence by thinking holistically 
• How students at TU Delft is helping paraplegics walk again
• Mining Sci-fi and fantasy reading for soft skills
• Now is the time: get out of your comfort zone!

Links and Resources:

Eli Hughes AltiumLive Presentation: Crossing the Chasm
AltiumLive 2020 Presentations
Jeremy Blum AltiumLive 2018: Empathic Engineering
OnTrack Insight with Lee Ritchey
Altium Stories: Project March (Exoskeleton)
Eric Bogatin Amazon Author Page
OnTrack Insight Videos
Article:  5 Essential Soft Skills for a Successful Career in Engineering

 

Altium 365: Where the World Designs Electronics

Angus Thomson is Senior Electronic Engineer and founder of CircuitBuilder, a brand new platform for simplifying the development of custom electronics out of Suffolk, England. Angus joins the OnTrack Podcast to share his experiences as CircuitBuilder’s founder, and to discuss the fine points of CircuitBuilder’s evolving business model, which has so far proven immune to the challenges of the global pandemic.

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Watch the video, click here.

Show Highlights

• Introduction to Angus Thomson 
• ”I thought: there’s a better way to do this”—Angus’ road to entrepreneurship
• How CircuitBuilder utilizes Altium 365 to provide customers with realtime 3D views of their designs
• The CircuitBuilder growing network of engineers 
• CircuitBuilder’s successful, lightweight recruitment process 
• Proving it out in your own backyard: Angus on expanding market reach
• Transparency: How Altium 365 pushes CircuitBuilder beyond the errors of the past
• Design, Manufacture, or both? CircuitBuilder’s evolving business model
• The secret of CircuitBuilder’s resilience during the coronavirus health crisis
• Angus offers his insight on the future of design in a post COVID-19 world, and on CircuitBuilder’s role in that future 

Resources:

• Angus Thomson on LinkedIn
• Circuit Builder on Linkedin
• Circuit Builder Website
• Circuit Hub Website

 

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Istvan Novak, Principal Signal and Power Integrity Engineer for Samtec Inc. and winner of the DesignCon 2020 Engineer of the Year Award joins the OnTrack podcast to talk picosatellites, simulation tools, and the rising importance of power integrity.

Altium 365 Podcast Listener Discount

Show Highlights

• Introduction to Istvan Novak 
• A brief look at Samtec Inc., the successful computer equipment manufacturing company headquartered in Indiana.
• Istvan’s path to becoming a Power Integrity expert
• CubeSats and the students who make them
• The challenges of dimensionality: has power integrity become more important than signal integrity?
• When Power Integrity is an afterthought
• The value of expert disagreement
• “Regardless of what we want to simulate, we can find good simulation tools to do it”: Good design and the challenges of modeling and simulation
• Closing thoughts; the first working Picosatellite; and the first electrosmog map of the globe 

Resources:

• Istvan Novak on LinkedIn
• Samtec: gEEk spEEk SI Webinars.
• Samtec Silicon-to-Silcon Solutions Website
• The SI-List Archives
• Istvan Novak: DesignCon 2020 Engineer of the Year Award 
• BUDAPEST UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY AND ECONOMICS Picosatellite
• Istvan Novak’s Electrical Integrity Website
• Picotest Website
• Signal Integrity Journal
• Design 007 Magazine, See pg. 38 Do You Really Need That Ferrite Bead in the PDN?
• First Electrosmog Map of the globe 

 

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The town of Calumet, with a population of barely seven-hundred, was once the booming epicenter of Michigan’s upper peninsula mining industry. When the industry began to fail, unemployment skyrocketed, and the townspeople sought local solutions for creating jobs that could sustain the town’s families.

Rob Cooke, Director of Engineering Services at Calumet Electronics Corp, joins the OnTrack podcast to discuss the Open Source Ventilator project, his experiences implementing Altium-365, and the radical decision business owners in that small town of Calumet, Michigan made more than 50 years ago, which led to the rise of Calumet Electronics Corp.

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Watch the video, click here.

Show Highlights

• Intro to Rob Cooke: how he got involved with Dugan Karnazes and the Open Source Ventilator Project.
• From copper ore to copper pours: Calumet, Michigan’s fascinating backstory.
• So what’s the hold-up? The right tool for avoiding excessive holds and other barriers to expedient design.
• Reality transcends the map: Altium-365 demos vs firsthand experience.
• The impact and implications of sudden hyper-efficiency at the designer, fabricator, and assembler level.
• The shock of realtime: “This is what can happen when things don’t go on hold!”
• Rob offers some final thoughts on the purchasing and quoting paradigm.

Resources:

• Rob Cooke on LinkedIn
• Calumet Website
• Open Source Ventilator Video
• AltiumLive 365 Demo
• Altium 365 product page
• Open Source Ventilator Project (OSV) Combats Ventilator Shortage
• Previous Episode with Rob Cooke: How to Conquer Data Package Problems

 

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The renowned global trade association known as IPC has put together a network of printed board design engineering affiliates under the name IPC Design. IPC Design’s affiliates are comprised of PCB design engineers across the globe who are working to advance the art and science of printed design engineering.

IPC Design’s Patrick Crawford and Teresa Rowe join the OnTrack Podcast 

Work from Anywhere. Connect with Anyone.

Watch the video, click here. 

Show Highlights

 

• What is IPC Design, and what is its primary mission?
• Increased global presence and participation: How IPC is molding its future.
• IPC Design’s worldwide buy-in, its fresh new participants, and how the quarantine has affected participation. 
• Has productivity gone up since quarantine?
• Lessons in remote working and the importance of taking time for yourself.
• Between January 2020 and now.
• What’s in store for the future: IPC’s collaborative content model. 
• America, Europe, and Asia: IPC’s leadership group and global design committee.
• IPC Design is looking to fill a leadership role in Asia.
• What’s in it for you, the designer? Teresa and Patrick count the ways designers will benefit from IPC Design.
• ”Let’s start up a chapter!”: How individuals, student groups, and companies can get affiliated with IPC Design.
• Translators of the world, connect! How IPC Design can serve and collaborate with STEM groups all over the globe.

 

 

 

Resources:

Teresa Rowe on LinkedIn
Patrick Crawford on LinkedIn
IPC Website
Link to IPC Design webpage
Link to IPC Design enrollment page
Patrick Crawford’s video presentation on IPC Design
Realtime with IPC
IPC CEO John Mitchell on the Impact of COVID-19 on the Electronics Supply Chain

 

Work from Anywhere. Connect with Anyone.

 

 

 

Work from Anywhere. Connect with Anyone.

Altium 365 is here, and its CAD-aware approach to cloud-based design is already cutting lead times down by orders of magnitude. How will this affect designers, and how will it affect the electronics industry as a whole? Leigh Gawne, Chief Software Architect at Altium 365, answers these questions and more. Get an exclusive look inside the impact Altium 365 is having on the electronics industry and learn more about this powerful new tool.

Watch the video, click here.

Show Highlights:

• Up until this point, ECAD has been confined to the desktop. Leigh explains how Altium 365 breaks this trend, allowing anyone with an internet-enabled device to interact and collaborate in the design process—directly from a web browser.
• No download necessary: Altium 365 ditches the software download for manufacturers and other stakeholders.
• Is the Google Drive comparison accurate? Leigh demonstrates how Altium 365’s approach to ‘CAD-awareness’ pushes its capabilities far beyond the reach of ordinary cloud-based design tools.
• Is this design manufacturable? Resolving essential questions with the click of a button in Altium 365, allowing designers to instantly share designs as a live view or as a snapshot.
• Never lose a comment thread again. Leigh explains how Altium 365’s ‘contextual commenting’ feature allows designers to attach comment threads right to relevant features in the design.
• Customers, procurement personnel, and project management: How Altium 365 facilitates seamless interaction with secondary stakeholders.
• Altium 365’s option for browser-driven design review minimizes mistakes and pulls more stakeholders into the chain. 
• Supply chains are dynamic and are often subject to radical, unexpected changes, especially in a pandemic. Leigh breaks down Altium 365’s “baked-in” Octopart capability, which allows designers to monitor their supply chains in real-time. 
•  Navigating the ‘new normal’: Leigh examines Altium 365’s important and powerful role for product design in the post-coronavirus age.
• Out the door in 30 days: Reviewing Altium 365’s integral role in the Open Source Ventilator Project’s incredible success story. 
• Success all around: How Altium 365 makes it trivial to duplicate another company’s achievements.
• Leigh looks at the future of the electronics in the wake of this powerful new tool.

Links and Resources:

Exclusive Sharable Listener Discount Link
Altium Designer-Altium 365
Altium 365 Customer Stories Videos: Skyship, Arduino, Project March
Altium 365 Webpage
Altium 365 LIVE Demo from AltiumLive 2019 with Leigh Gawne
Open Source Ventilator Podcast with Dugan Karnazes 

 

Now you can get the ultimate PCB design productivity with the easiest platform for PCB design. Easily communicate design changes to your team with Altium 365. 

Work from Anywhere. Connect with Anyone.

Altium 365 has launched in the midst of a worldwide quarantine effort—a time when companies have drastically reduced the in-office workforce, and financial constraints and travel restrictions have never been tighter. 

Altium’s VP of marketing, Lawrence Romine, joins the OnTrack Podcast to explain how Altium 365 removes the obstacles presented by the lockdown effort, why it’s the perfect tool for the post-coronavirus environment, and how the launch timing couldn’t be more serendipitous.

Work from Anywhere. Connect with Anyone.

Watch the video, click here.

Show Highlights:

• Altium 365 has launched on schedule; a brief look at why the timing couldn’t be more perfect.
• Working remotely. The Altium 365 cloud based platform which Altium Designer and Concord Pro run on.
• Seamless integration: the symbiotic relationship between Altium Designer and Altium 365.
• Arduino, SkyShips, and you: the various types of Altium 365 users, and how the addition of new features addresses their individual needs.
• Flattening the curve: Altium’s conscientious approach to the learning curve when adding new features. 
• Design Reviews in a pandemic—a use case: How Altium 365 removes the obstacles presented by a remote work environment.  
• Some users describe the experience of Altium 365’s cloud-based real-time collaboration as “similar to working in Google Docs”. Lawrence elaborates.
• It’s as easy as sending a link: How Altium 365 frees up budgets by eliminating excessive travel, phone calls, and emails.
• “Simplicity is the ultimate expression of sophistication”: Lawrence recalls an automotive experience from his life in praise of Altium 365’s design ethic.
• As simple as using a web browser: How sales personnel are utilizing Altium 365 as a demonstration tool for prospective clients.
• Lawrence’s predictions about the farside of the COVID-19 calamity.

Links and Resources:

Exclusive Sharable Listener Discount Link
Altium Designer-Altium 365
Altium 365 Customer Stories Videos: Skyship, Arduino, Project March
Altium 365 Webpage
AltiumLive: Altium 365
Altium 365 Security

Now you can get the ultimate PCB design productivity with the easiest platform for PCB design. Easily communicate design changes to your team with Altium 365. 

Work from Anywhere. Connect with Anyone.

The OnTrack Podcast is pleased to welcome Ken Wyatt (also known as the ‘EMC Doctor’). Ken began his career as a designer in the aerospace industry, and later worked for Hewlett Packard, where he found that his background in RF and Microwave engineering helped prepare him for his role as an Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) Engineer. His work has since taken him all over the world, where he develops and provides in-house training and delivers presentations and live demonstration; definitely unique among presenters!

Retiring early in 2008, Ken has since become a prolific author, co-authoring three books, including his latest, in which he identifies why products fail to meet EMI/EMC regulatory standards: ‘EMI Troubleshooting Cookbook for Product Designers’. 

Ken currently provides seminars on a variety of EMC related topics—touching on subjects not often taught at the university level. He also provides EMC consultation, EMC compliance and precompliance testing, design reviews, and training services for commercial, military/aerospace, scientific, consumer, and computing industry sectors.

See What's New in Altium Designer

Watch the Video, Click Here.

Show Highlights

• Ken lays out his career path, from his beginnings in the aerospace industry, to his current role as a consultant.
• ‘EMI Troubleshooting Cookbook for Product Designers’—a quick look at the book Ken co-authored with Patrick G. André.
• Addressing the prevailing trends in stackups and board design in general.
• Old habits die hard: Why the PCB is the heart of most EMI and EMC issues today, and pitfalls to avoid to move past these issues.
• Signals as the flow of electrons in copper traces and wires: How our education may have left out the whole story with respect to high frequency design.
• How simultaneous trends toward diminishing device size and the Internet of Things contributes to desensing and other issues on PCBs. 
• Staying “in the know”: Keeping up with our evolving understanding of the physics of PC boards and signal propagation is always challenging. Ken lays out some ways designers can stay up to speed. 
• Why Electromagnetic Compability programs at the university level are few and far between, and how Missouri University of Science and Technology stands out among them. 
• Case Studies: The trouble with dog trackers and blood transfusion machines. Ken discusses some challenges he’s come across in the field.
  
  

Resources:

www.emc-seminars.com

Ken Wyatt’s EMC blog

The EMC Blog (EDN)

Interference Technology Blog

Short video on the book with co-author Patrick André

Amazon author’s page

Ken Wyatt on LinkedIn

Ken Wyatt on Twitter: @emc_guru

 

See What's New in Altium Designer

In this episode we talk with Robert Feranec, a familiar name to many of our listeners. Apart from being a popular YouTuber, he’s also the founder and CEO of FEDEVEL Academy where he teaches PCB Design to people around the world. Robert shares what it takes to be a popular YouTuber, the work it takes to produce all the great content he creates and as a special bonus we’ll discuss Robert’s Keynote that he will deliver at AltiumLive PCB Summit this October in San Diego. 

Show Highlights:

• Robert considers himself lucky to have started working on complex boards almost immediately after university. This early start provided much experience and he soon began freelancing.
• As a freelancer, he did whole-board design i.e. specifications, schematics, layout, as well as testing and firmware. 
• He found he often couldn’t remember everything when using Altium Designer® and started doing YouTube videos, at first for himself, but soon garnered a following and today he has 24 000 followers.
• As he became more popular, he received many email questions daily, which was very time consuming and he decided to create a forum where he offered a course, and the rest is history. Robert teaches Altium Designer but also CAD-independent content.
• What goes into creating a video tutorial? Lots of preparation, a half-hour video takes almost two days to create. One hour of video training takes a week to create.
• AltiumLive Topic: How Other Companies Implement Their Hardware Design Process. Many people ask about how other companies implement hardware design, create and use libraries, collaboration (design flow) and working faster.
• Why do so many people only use a small percentage of their tool’s capacity? Most don’t need all the features. Many are nice to have but not always a necessity. Also, people learn to use the tool in a specific way and adding new features could interfere with an established workflow.
• Robert’s talk at AltiumLive will provide insight into libraries, creating new components, component lifecycle, creating new symbols as quickly as possible, ensuring correct footprints, and more. 
• What are the challenges around collaboration? Communication between different types of engineers and how to manage several engineers working on the same project.
• What about versioning and backup? Most companies will do both in the same way.
• Document releases are very complex, there are too many emails back and forth. Robert will talk about ensuring correct documentation and release procedures.
• What attracts people to your training? The different levels of the courses, the variety, and junior designers love them to upskill and get better jobs.

Links and Resources:

AltiumLive Summit 2019

Ben Jordan Podcast

Lawrence Romine Podcast

Altium Academic Page

Robert’s YouTube

FEDEVAL Academy 

Robert’s LinkedIn 

In this episode of the OnTrack Podcast we echo the style of “Ask me Anything” and feature Ben Jordan and Judy Warner who will mine the AltiumLive forum for questions. Ben will answer your questions about Engineering and PCB Design and Judy will respond to topics related to manufacturing and supply chain. Join us today as we tackle the question: If we have only one or two EEs, do we really need data management?

For future episodes, you can submit your questions on the AltiumLive forum, and sign up to be part of the community. Or email your questions directly to us.

Watch the video here.

Show Highlights:

• The Lounge is where the community talks about interesting topics related to PCB Design and Electronics Engineering, not necessarily only Altium products.
• Today’s question from the lounge is: “Is the Altium Vault really worthwhile in a company with just two EEs??” Perhaps another way to pose this question is: is it worth having a formal data management system for your electronics design, if you’re only a small business? We could even ask, is it worthwhile for an individual design contractor? The short answer is: Absolutely!
• Statistics and analytics from webinars, show that 80% of designers do not even use a formal version control system.
• A version control system allows you to have a central location for storing data, and as you work and make edits, and save files; it must be committed to the system as a revision.
• Version control allows you to go back to any point in time and restore it. Also, it allows comparison changes, in context, in a team or if you’re an individual designer.
• A normal backup system does not give you associativity between that moment in time and what you were doing, or the engineering intent.
• A version control system is not a formal data management system: it doesn’t give lifecycle management or links to supply chain data.
• A true data management system would not permit release unless everything is saved, committed to version control and contains the latest revision. Including in the component library.
• Provides accountability in the way you use and store your data.
• What are some problems with footprints in manufacturing?
• Panelization, v-cut, scoring for breakaway tabs etcetera, not following procedure.
• Slow down to hurry up - spend time upfront to set up the system, then you can move faster.
• Documentation is essential in the industry for re-use and provides a lifecycle.
• Data management keeps you accountable.

 

Links and Resources:

Join AltiumLive forum, and check out The Lounge

OP’s original question and related question

Email new questions to: OnTrack@altium.com

 

Electronic Components Shortages, or part shortages are so big that it impacts nearly every aspect of electronics design and manufacture. Lead times continue to rise no matter how fast parts are being produced. It is just not possible for production to catch up. The reality of this current shortage means it’s time to be innovative, and guest John Watson has some ideas to help including an expert tip Altium Designer users can put to good use. (Hint: ActiveBOM can help!) Listen in to get background on the electronic component shortage, what pro PCB designers are doing to address the concern proactively and stay ahead of PCB component shortages.

 

Show Highlights:

Shortages first started with capacitors - specifically with multi-layer ceramic capacitors (MLCC) MLCCs  - 3 trillion created a year but the supply is still not meeting demand

This is a major crisis in the industry and its spreading

The part shortages are so big, it impacts every aspect. Shortages affecting: Board sensors, MOSFETs (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors), Resistors and Transistors. Previously unaffected supply chain areas are now being affected.

No matter how fast these are being produced, not possible for production to catch up.

There are three industries driving the high demand that is leading to part shortages:

• IoT - estimated 20 billion new IoT devices in next few years
• Mobile phone - 1.5 trillion mobile phones in next year. 1,000 capacitors in each phone.
• Automotive - 2,000 - 3,000 capacitors in regular / 22,000 capacitors estimated in electric car - as newer technologies are being pulled into regular automatic cars, just think of all the electronics i.e. safety features, automatic parking, etc.

 

New automotive organization:

AEC - Automotive Electronic Council is putting out standards that will be required for their components. Why? Because...

More rigorous components are needed in order to perform in harsh environments.

Almost 50% of those components have fallen out, or failed, to meet their tests.

 

On the component / part manufacturing side:

Converting lines from large components to smaller ones because not many people buying them.

Manufacturers shutting down entire lines so they can produce more popular sizes.

On the vendor side:

Vendors have moved towards part allocation - big companies get first in line for parts.

“You can only buy parts with if you have bought with us in the past year” - this is allocation.

Once a company is in allocation, they begin to stockpile components.

What kind of lead times are most common right now:

Short lead time - 16 weeks

Medium - 32 weeks

Long - 80 weeks

 

What makes this part shortage so different?

Mainly a market driven shortage, that cannot be pinpointed to a specific material shortage

It’s almost an ‘emotional shortage’ where people may be hoarding more than they need.

The extended duration of it is also unlike previous shortages.

It’s a scenario where the market compounded onto itself with its reaction to it.

HOT TIP: The next big thing is Broadband Satellite. SpaceX and low flying satellites to make everybody wireless. This is huge, it’s a lot of hardware.

Component Shortage Hacks to get through the Crisis:

• Overall, be as proactive as possible.
• Evaluate common design guidelines and step out of them. For example, can we change the norm values, parameters and tolerances? It doesn’t always require the most stringent guideline, there is room for adjustment, depending on the type of device and requirements.
• Be proactive, for example run your schematic through ActiveBOM and get flags on what components are not recommended. Don’t wait until layout, do it early on.
• You can also use Octopart, there are other free services.
• Leverage your procurement organization, give them the heads up with difficult components so they can be aware of the situation in advance.
• Create multiple footprints for designs.
• No single sourcing for components, don’t get tied into a single organization.

 

Where do you source parts or find out about availability during the shortage?

• Read the quarterly reports to get the latest, look at the numbers, watch the trend.
• Keep aware of the issues i.e. part availability reports
• Texas Instruments also has a lot of information.

 

PCB Component Shortages and using ActiveBom:

“ActiveBOM came out just in time. It has been the go to tool for us.”

Now we run legacy products through ActiveBOM.

Links and Resources:

John Watson Podcast on PLM and Library management

OnTrack article about Part Shortages

Watch John Watson clips on Youtube

Download the latest Altium Designer 19 today.

 

Altium Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, David Marrakchi is here on the show to talk about Altium Designer 19. This latest release is part two of three major releases Altium has planned to level up high-speed design capabilities. As an engineer who likes to wear multiple hats - and with experience in the field as an Electrical Engineer - David has done it all from developing requirements to schematic capture and PCB layout, across industries including home automation, military, and medical. Now he is bringing his rich skillset to the intersection of innovation and implementation by helping people understand Altium Designer and how to get the most out of the PCB design tools, easily and in the least amount of time. David is an inside expert on Altium Designer sharing his expertise on the overall processes of PCB design and product realization; playing a major role in creating product demonstrations, webinars, whiteboard videos, and interactive articles that illuminate the processes of printed circuit board manufacturing.

 

Watch the Podcast Video here and see more Altium Designer 19 videos.

 

Show Highlights:

Altium Designer 19 is released. David is hosting webinars to demonstrate new features. You can join live or on-demand--sign up for live webinars here:  https://www.altium.com/webinars

 

What’s new in Altium Designer 19?

 

High Speed Design Features: What they are and how do they help designers?

• Advanced Layer Stack Management: Impedance solver, material library (vast array, pre-defined) and microvia support. Very important for tracks carrying high speed signals.  
• Micro via (more info in the Interactive Routing webinar)
• Impedance modeling
• Material values - (there are always new materials coming out!)

 

New Part Search:

• Find a part that both meets requirements and that is also available!
• Search and filter with parametric information - global parametric supplier search. i.e. size, package, height, frequency, stock, model, and compare two parts.

Routing Improvement:

• New follow mode (allows for locking i.e. curves)  
• HOTKEY / SHORTCUT: ctrl+f to lock to contour

Trace Glossing Improvements

Draftsman

Multiboard

Printed Electronics

Check out this Podcast with Tactotek to learn more.

 

Altium has a culture that embraces a mindset of continual “Relentless Innovation”

 

Some users say they’d rather us fix more bugs--why do we choose to continually innovate?

 

What value do you think this commitment to innovation provides to our users and the design community as a whole?

 

If you are an existing Altium Designer User you can download the latest version now at Altium.com.

 

If you are new to Altium Designer, we invite you to get behind the wheel and take it for a test drive and see why Altium has become the fastest growing PCB Design company in the world.

Links and Resources:

On-demand Webinars  

Webinar Sign-up

Interactive Routing webinar

Learn about Design for Manufacturing

Buy Altium Designer 19

Altium Designer Free Trial

Signal integrity expert, Dr. Eric Bogatin, shares why best measurement practices have become his go-to topic when speaking with PCB designers around the world. As Signal Integrity Evangelist at Teledyne LeCroy, a leading provider of oscilloscopes, protocol analyzers and related test and measurement solutions, Eric lectures around the world and he will be one of the keynote presenters at AltiumLive 2018: PCB Design Summit. Listen to Eric and Judy talk about the importance of best measurement practices and where to learn more — from webinars to conferences to the Signal Integrity Journal and Rule Number 9. Eric also has some real insights, so tune in and learn more in this episode of the OnTrack Podcast.

 

Show Highlights:

• The OnTrack Podcast is in 84 countries! Congrats to Daud Zoss who was the closest guess at 37 countries. He gets a free pass to AltiumLive as Judy’s guest.
• Dr Eric Bogatin will be a keynote speaker at AltiumLive in October 2018
• Best measurement practices - how do you get the answer to the performance, root cause, characterization, etc. as quickly as possible?
• How do you know what the performance of your instrument is, so that you know its capabilities and what the device is doing compared to your measurement instrument? It’s important to know what the properties of your scope in the probe is, to know the properties of the device you’re testing.
• Measurement data: Such as the rise time, frequency or figure of merit must be excavated to give you useful information. How do you get the information so it’s high quality and can be trusted, how do you turn it into information that you can turn into action?
• Eric is also the Editor of Signal Integrity Journal, working with Janine Love and Patrick Hindle.
• Expert content - if anyone is interested in writing a technical article for Signal Integrity Magazine, please write: Eric or Judy.
• Janine Love manages the EDI CON coming up in Santa Clara in October (a couple weeks after AltiumLive). Part of this is EDI CON University offering tutorials by industry experts.
• Industry Experts on the Editorial Advisory Board: Bert Simonovich, Yuriy Shlepnev, Larry Smith and Steve Sandler, Rula Bakleh, Jay Diepenbrock, Vladimir Dmitriev-Zdorov, Alfred Neves, Istvan Novak, Doug Smith, and Lisa Ward.
• Rule #9 - Before you do a measurement or simulation, think about what you expect to see ahead of time, and if it’s not what you expect, there’s always a reason for it. You need to identify the reason why it’s not what you expect.
• Hands on learning is a necessity for students. Eric and Mike Horowitz put together a five-week, standalone crash course on how to design a board.
• Designing for connectivity is just about driving the board to enable finding the parts and laying them out for assembly. Really simple.
• The lack of experience with Oscilloscopes is surprising because nobody has ever taught these students the correct method.
• Hands on experience is giving students an edge in the marketplace. There isn’t enough of the ‘real world’ activity in most Universities.

Links and Resources:

LeCroy webinars

Upcoming events at LeCroy

SI Journal webinars

Upcoming SI Webinars  

Hyperloop competition

AltiumLive 2018: Annual PCB Design Summit

 

 

If anyone is interested in writing a technical article, please write:

Eric Bogatin or Judy Warner

To see ALL show notes and watch the video recording please visit: 

https://resources.altium.com/altium-podcast/signal-integrity-expert-eric-bogatin-on-best-measurement-practices

 

 

Hi everyone, this is Judy Warner with Altium's OnTrack Podcast. Thanks for joining again, if you would please connect with me on LinkedIn I like to share lots of information relative to PCB designers and engineers who are laying out boards and on Twitter I'm @AltiumJudy and Altium is on all the usual places; Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

So please let us know what you'd like to hear about on the podcast and we will do our best to get it done. So today I have a rock star with us and he needs no introduction . But before we get going with Dr. Eric Bogatin; I wanted to say that a few weeks back I had put a challenge out there to see if you guys could guess how many countries the On Track podcast has reached; and we have a winner! So congratulations to Daud Zoss. He's a Senior Staff Engineer at Dexcom; he guessed 37 countries and he was the closest one, unfortunately it was only about half, because we've actually reached 84 countries, I kid you not! So anyways, thank you for listening and engaging with us and all across the world. We really appreciate it.

So today, as I mentioned, we have Dr. Eric Bogatin with us who needs no introduction; who is a signal integrity guru. You might know him from many conferences in North America and I suppose around the world Eric has has presented, and I'm lucky enough to be here in California, where I've seen him present many times on Be The Signal and now the Be The Signal and Eric Bogatin brand is flying under the Teledyne LeCroy flag. So he has lots of lectures and demos and things and I'll let him tell you more about that. So Eric, welcome, we are glad to have you.

Hey thanks Judy, I'm happy to be here with you today and tell you about all the things I've got going on.

Well, we're super excited to have you as a keynote at AltiumLive, so we really appreciate you coming out for that and we've done some neat things together with students, so we'll talk about more about that. So why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about your day job at Teledyne LeCroy?

Sure yes, so many of you may know, and I know you - - I knew you back when I had my own company it was Bogatin Enterprises, and I literally went around the world and did training classes. And about seven years ago, my training company was acquired by LeCroy and we continued the training classes and then began to make a slight transition to, most of what I've done over the years has been best design practices.

How to get the design right the first time and LeCroy is in the measurement business; we are the third largest manufacturer of oscilloscopes and some of the highest end oscilloscopes; and our CTO Dave Graef, he likes to say that that in designing, the goal is to get it right the first time, but if you don't get it right the first time then the goal is to get it right the second time; and the way you get it right the second time is, you have to find the root cause of the problem and invariably that involves some measurements. So that's kind of the connection with LeCroy, is we're number three in the  scope world and have the highest end performance scopes out there.

We really specialize in the business of helping customers get it right the second time; kind of a faster time to insight. And so we started out when I joined them seven years ago, doing the same Best Design Practices presentations and classes I used to do, and then over the years since then, I've been working on this new area of Best Measurement Practices and so, with my day job at Teledyne LeCroy, I am still Signal Integrity Evangelist, but I spend more time now going around talking to folks about, and doing presentations on what are some of the best measurement practices. How do you kind of get the answer to either the performance, or the root cause, or the characterization, or get the Figure of Merit? How do you get that as quickly as possible?

And recently, in fact, I've got a couple of live events in the Bay Area coming up - actually next week - in last week in August, and then in Boston in September. And you can check the Teledyne LeCroy website for the events page to see where I'm coming next, but those presentations are really focused on, how do you - I call it kind of two aspects of in best measurement practice - one is situational awareness. How do you pay attention to - how do you know what the performance of your instrument is, so that you understand what its capabilities are, so what your device is doing, compared to your instruments. So you make sure that you are not seeing an artifact in the measurement.

Wow that's interesting.

Situational, because I find in talking a lot of folks about measurements; gosh there's a lot of confusion about what's the scope doing. And unfortunately there's no such thing as the ideal instrument; they're always - - or ideal probe, for that matter. There are always interactions of the probe and the scope with the device we're looking at, and it's important to understand what the properties of your scope in the probe are, to know how far away you are from the properties of the device you're testing so that you're getting good quality information about the device you care about and not an artifact of how you're doing the measurement. So that's the first piece of what we try to present and teach - those principles.

And the second piece is - and I see this with my students all the time - that they sometimes feel that just getting the data, just getting the measurement is enough. So they, push the right buttons and they get a screenshot and say: okay , here's my data. And I see a lot of engineers doing that as well, and the data is just the starting place. That's not - you're not done with the data - you need to take that data, the measurement and turn it into information. So you need to extract out, what's the few pieces of valuable information.

Like what's the rise time, or what's the frequency, or what's the jitter? It's a figure of merit that takes a lot of data and gives you one or two numbers that you can do something with. I was giving a talk at one of my events a couple weeks ago, and as I mentioned, that we have this huge amount of data in a scope. I mean, one acquisition can be we can take up to five Giga samples worth of data - but you know stupidly maybe - 10 - 20 mega samples but that's 10 or 20 million data points in one acquisition. It's a huge amount of data but you only want one or two numbers out of it. And so I used to call it data mining, and someone said: hey with all that data there it's not mining, it's excavating.

So it's kind of excavating the data for useful information, and then the third piece - once we have the information - is this: so what? It's how do you turn that information into action? How do you use the information you've got, to tell you is this good or bad? Should I, raise the line width or decrease the line width? What do I want to do with that information now? How am I going to use that to influence a decision? So it's those three steps that we talk about in our workshops; of how do you get the information, do you have high quality of confidence for the data, do you have high confidence in it? How do you turn that data into information, extract a couple of figures of merit, the nuggets of valuable information and how do you take that information and turn it into action?

So that's what I'm focusing on these days, the idea of best measurement practices. In addition to the stuff I've done forever, of best design practices. So that's kind of what I'm involved in now, spending a lot of time going around, doing live demonstrations, incorporating them in my workshops. Now we've got some really cool scopes and bring a lot of test vehicles and structures, so we can do live measurements of various signals. And so it's always a lot of fun when you can have...

A physical scope there, right.

-yeah a working device and the scope, and then people that come to these; you know I love working the crowd, and we talk about: well, if that's really what's going on, if you made the the rise time shorter, what what will you see? Or if I expanded the time base, what's the signal going to look like? And so we can do that as a live experiment in the group. So they're a lot of fun, very interactive activities. So that's that's what I do is my day job now.

Well, that's a lot, and it sounds - you make it sound really fun and engaging. So also, Teledyne LeCroy will have a table at AltiumLive, I hope we can talk you guys into bringing an oscilloscope so we'll let you work our crowd and I'm sure.

You know, another thing - oh by the way - I would encourage people that are listening to connect with Eric on LinkedIn, or connect with me I've been sharing those classes that Eric is teaching, so you'll be able to pick those up and see the different locations that he's teaching those courses. And we will also add those links below here in the show notes.

So if you're in those areas you can hop into one of Eric's classes, and he's super fun too it's a very plain spoken - and like I, can learn things from Eric Bogatin, and I am not, my technical prowess is limited, so I really appreciate that about Eric. The other thing you do, we have some friends in common which are Horizon House, the publishers of Microwave Journal, have published a new magazine called the SI Journal, which I am very excited about and you are also the editor of SI Journal, and we have friend in common Janine Love and Pat Hindle and the whole group. I used to write a blog for Microwave Journal that is put out by the same publishers on their website, talking about making RF boards and all the fun that goes along with that. And so now, Eric is editor of SI Journal, so you can also subscribe to that online. We will also share that link. So how's that been so far? Tell us about your job - how long has it been now? It hasn't been too terribly long?

You know what, I think it was about - - it's almost 2 years now, so I'm just going to...

Wow! I was gonna say a year and it's like two years. Wow.

So I think it was it'd be - - between Pat and Janine they kind of came up - they've been focusing on the Microwave Journal which has been around for 30-some years and this is one of the - I think it's the top...

I think it's like 60 years or something.

Is it 60 years?

I don't know I might be...

It's a long time - it's been around forever.

And it's been a real icon in the industry for good quality articles about microwave technology and with Janine's experience with the Design Con and in the signal integrity world; I think between she and Pat they realized: hey, the industry could really use another kind of curated source of high value information and so many of the magazines that we're used to getting have - - the print magazines have disappeared and they're all online, and so Pat and Janine decided to create this as an online journal initially. And they asked me to come on board as the editor; really the technical editor right at the beginning - about two years ago -

and so since then we've been kind of planning it out, putting together the editorial review board - of really some industry heavyweights and kind of creating a lot of new content, soliciting content from other experts in the industry, in fact, while I have a captive audience here, if anybody out there listening, is interested in writing technical articles for us, that'd be great.

Drop me an email or send it through Judy, and I'd be happy to take a look at what you like to do. We created this and our focus is to provide high value content that's curated. That there's so much information out there online right now. If you do a google search on Signal Integrity or Power Integrity it's not that you don't find anything, you find like 10 gazillion different sources.

You get flooded.

Yeah it's hard to know what's the good stuff and what the stuff is that I should waste my time with and so I think that's really the value of having an online publication or portal that is curated, and that's what we try to do is between myself and Janine and Pat and the editorial advisory board; we try to curate the content so that it's in our opinion what we would consider to be high-value content. And so we don't want to waste people's time or our own time and so there's, we think, a lot of really good valuable content. We've done the traditional stuff of short columns, of feature-length articles. Janine manages the annual conference EDI CON, which is now coming to the Santa Clara area in October. I think it's a couple weeks after AltiumLive.

Yah, it is, it's really close.

And part of that is now I think Janine's calling it the EDI CON University which is going to be tutorials by industry experts that are available for all the attendees. And then she also manages webinars, and if I can just plug a previous webinar. So we had Rick Hartley do a webinar...

Which we love and you know as I mentioned you and Rick are just so well respected and the SI field so I'm glad you snatched him up.

Yes we got him to do one a couple months ago and then that's recorded and posted on the...

Oh great!

-and then I did one a couple weeks ago that's also up there. So we have maybe it's 20 or 30 different webinars and they're all free and all available for anybody if you go to the SI Journal.com website, and you can look under videos and webinars, anybody can access all the content on the SI Journal is free as well.

So, there's some other people that are dear friends Bert Simonovich I know is on your team on the magazine who - - I think is Yuriy on that team as well?

Yeah Yuriy's been involved Istvan Novak has been on the Editorial Advisory Board. We just brought on Steve Sandler - - let's see; Larry Smith who is, he's my buddy, we worked on a book together that came out last year on Power Integrity and he now is at Micron; used to be at Qualcomm, he's maybe the one or two world expert on power integrity. So I learned a lot working with Larry. Let's see - - so yeah those are them.

They're all heavy hitters I mean, all really, they are the industry experts you really have, kudos to Horizon House for putting together such a crack team with you at the helm, which is just incredible, and like you said curating that content. Because there's so much noise out there. How do we bring the noise down and just cherry-pick, the best pieces? And I was kind of around before and as they were launching EDI CON and I was really glad to see them, as the high-speed digital and the RF world kind of moved together and some of the challenges were kind of overlapping to launch a show like EDI CON I think is really exciting and this magazine so, yay! Very excited about that so I can't... and again we'll put all these links below.

I'll even I'll see if I'll go pluck out some of those webinars and put those links in too if you didn't send those to me already.

So while I'm plugging webinars can I plug one other webinar too-

Yeah,

-that I should have mentioned. So I've been spending a lot of time, too much time, traveling doing these live events but also doing webinars; I mentioned the one with SI Journal. I've also been doing some through LeCroy, and we have a whole landing page on what LeCroy has done.

Yeah there's a lot there.

There's a lot of high value content that's all free. Anybody can view them and I'm hoping you'll put up a link to the webinar page from from LeCroy as well.

Okay.

I've put a series together on, a little bit about fundamentals of measurements, part of this best measurement practices series that I mentioned earlier they're one-hour webinars on various scope measurement principles and I'm doing them on a regular basis. I think we have two or three more scheduled for the rest of this year and then we'll have another series starting up in January.

Exciting, I like the idea of this best measurement practices, it's like really practical.

Yeah and it's the same thing with design practice. There are accepted practices that you want to follow unless you have a strong, compelling reason. Otherwise these are the right ways of doing things.

Right.

And same thing with measurement; there are just as many ways of screwing up a measurement as there is a design and so you've got to pay attention to both of them.

And there's a human in the loop too besides your probe and all that, so.

Oh absolutely.

So if the human isn't 'tuned up' -

Yeah

- now so one of the principles that I teach my graduate students and at University and also engineers I talk to, is I call it rule number nine and... have I talked to you about rule nine? Okay I'm definitely gonna be mentioning it at the at my keynote because I think it's one of the most important rules for any engineer and basically it says: before you do a measurement or simulation, you want to first anticipate. Think about what you expect to see and I have found that to be the most valuable kind of habit to get into, because just like you said, when there's a human involved it's easy to make a mistake. And how do you know that you don't have the connector connected where it should be, or how do you know: I think I'm looking on channel two, but I'm really going on channel three? Or I typed in 17 but I meant 71? How do you know?

You can check yourself but there's a limit to, how well you can check yourself and so, if you think about what you expect to see ahead of time, whether measurement or simulation and you look at the result and it's not what you expect, there's always a reason for it and you shouldn't proceed with that information until you've identified how come it's not what I expect. And when I do these live demos in front of groups, I'm constantly making mistakes because you know, it's under pressure. I get a screw in that connector and I'm not sure which demo am I on right now, and so I'm always looking at the screen to see, is it what I expect to see, and I can tell instantly when I've done something wrong because I use rule number nine. And I sometimes play a game with the audience, the engineers there, and say: okay, we expect to see this waveform go up and then down and it's flat - how come?

And it's good experience, good practice, that thinking of what could go wrong in the debugging process because that's what we all end up doing and the more experienced we can become at finding the root cause and why it's not what we expect I think, the quicker we can get to a good answer and move on to the next problem. So it's an incredibly powerful habit that I use all the time and I try to teach all my students.

This is what I love about your classes and things you teach Eric. I've sat in a few of them over the years is, that they're insanely practical and intuitive and memorable. Like rule number nine, I can remember that right, so I really have to say that about you.

Of course, don't forget I also reinforce good behavior with chocolate so that...

Oh yeah he does! He throws chocolate out at his classes so yeah it's like Pavlov's dog, yeah it's so true. Well I wanted to jump into the way that you and I started working together, is I think a month or two ago Iconnect007 came out with a magazine with an empty pair of shoes walking down the street, and it said, who's gonna fill your shoes? And everybody seems to get on this bandwagon about all the people that really, fundamentally understand PCB design in regards to, not just designing but manufacturing, assembly, the whole, all the stakeholders that are kind of implied in that process are greying and gonna retire, and so you know, there's been studies out by UP Media saying - by a pretty large sample - saying that in under 10 years half of PCB designers are going to be gone and so everyone has sort of gotten to this hysteria about it seems like the unanswerable question.

What I appreciate that you've done is I'm going to call you professor now - he wears lots of hats - professor Bogatin called me up and said, Judy, you know, I'm gonna do this program, he's used different tools right now that this - I think the students were sort of driving, or somebody was driving one at Altium Designer, so you kicked off this amazing semester-long course at the University of Colorado Boulder and you - I think co-teach that right Eric?

Yeah so I can give you the quick history.

Okay let's hear it.

So I've been teaching a graduate signal integrity class at CU Boulder for a number of years, based on my textbook and in talking to folks there, we realized that our students - so CU Boulder tends to be very project oriented very hands-on we believe in that, you know you learn from textbooks, you learn from studying, but you understand by doing. And it's the hands-on part that you really - everything comes together. And there were a number of classes that required building circuit boards and I would get called in as a consultant to help them in designing the circuit boards and there's relatively simple boards, two layer boards. But these kids had absolutely no idea. They could push the buttons on the tool, but they had absolutely no idea how the performance was influenced by it by what they do in the layout. And so it became really clear that, boy it sure would help if they had a little bit of guidance in how to design boards correctly. And so a number of us got together and realized: hey, we need this more formal training and a buddy of mine Mike Horowitz, who is an expert at design of circuit boards, we got together and put this course together which was - and it's kind of a funny organization too - we're also trying another experiment.

At CU you are semester based, and some courses are typically like 15 weeks or so. But we are experimenting with creating short five-week modules so it'll be the full regular course, that is a normal schedule of of 3 hours per week but it only lasts for five weeks. And so, Mike and I were tasked with putting a course on Printed Circuit Board Design and Manufacture together, that would have a five week beginning piece that could be a standalone so that most students, undergraduates, would take that and that'd be enough to get them going on their projects and then everybody else would continue for the rest of the ten weeks. And that would go into more detail so it gets them more experienced at circuit board design. And so that's how it got started, and Mike and I worked on it - it's every semester; so we did it twice last year and now. So that was kind of our joint development. And now Mike has gotten more involved in his CEO activities and so I'm gonna solo it this semester.

Oh okay.

So the format is basically a five-week crash course on how to design a board so you have a good chance of success when you build a two layer board. And then the other five weeks are more the same, more the technical detail about measurement technique - this idea the best measurement practices. How do you bring up a board? How do you design a board for simple tests and bring up? And then we'll do four layer boards, and then a little bit on the more high-performance systems. So it's a little bit more advanced and really you know, the way we've positioned it as: there are two levels of design. The first is if you can build a prototype and build it with a solderless breadboard and have wires going all over the place; if that works then designing the circuit board and having it work is really straightforward.

We call it designing just for connectivity you don't have to worry about performance, it's about, you want to be able to manufacture it, but performance isn't on; the interconnects don't matter, and and some of the student designs are just designed for connectivity. It's just about driving the board so you can find the parts of the library and build it in the schematic and then place them on the board and lay them out, so you can assemble it by hand - pretty straightforward.

But many of our student designs these days, are getting more sophisticated. They use a Wi-Fi connection, so you have RF on the board, they have sensitive analog to digital converters on the boards, they have components that sometimes -even BGA components - where the microcontrollers are using a really fine pitch; hard to design by hand, and some of these have a couple nanosecond edges where ground bounce is a tremendous problem. And so we're focusing our class on how to design a board. Not just for connectivity - that's the easy part - but for performance, so that you can designed so it's manufacturable, it's lower-cost reduce the - so much of it is risk management - and then kind of the basic performance issues to worry about.

And in my keynote, I'm thinking that I will probably present on what we have found to be the two most impactful design issues in designing a board, not for connectivity but for performance. If all you think about is connectivity you're gonna run into two significant problems. And so one of the topics is this idea of rethinking how signals propagate on interconnects and I've done this at PCB West and I did it at some of my other courses - and I had a couple people come up to me afterwards and tell me that it was a life-changing moment for them. Because I completely changed the way they've been working on boards for 20 years, and I completely changed how they thought about signals on boards. So I hope it will have a similar impact at AltiumLive, but it's going to be about how to rethink and how to train your intuition to think about how signals really propagate on interconnects.

I loved your Be the Signal....

so... and I'm sure this is a little bit more complex than what you're gonna present, but I remember the first time I ever sat in a course by Eric Bogatin, and he was talking about 'be the signal' and he's like: if this signal's moving from A to B what do you think is gonna happen to la-la-la... and I'm sitting there as a non-designer and he's like: no, be the signal. What would you do? And kind of helped us to frame, kind of this visual - and I'm a visual person - so I like to kind of visualize, what the things that were going on, in that signal path to create whatever it was. So I really loved that.

And that's basically what I'm going to be talking about, that Zen approach to thinking about signals propagating and and how to apply you know -  I'll probably mention it once, in my talk, about how to apply master's equations but in an intuitive way, to understand what's really going on in the interconnect.

So Eric's talk is called 'Living in the White Space' and that will be relative to signal propagation and I'm sure all of us, our brain will explode a little. I have these moments with Rick Hartley from time to time too where he says something and I'm like: nah! You know it could be that simple or whatever and I'm sure, you know Rick Hartley is a student of Eric Bogatin so, I'm sure it's more of the same.

So, well I really appreciate you Eric, taking on these students at university level. Here at Altium absolutely, I think I would do this part of my job for free; is to help students get equipped with not only tools - like I can give them free tools - but that's a really incomplete model, for them to learn. They're learning about electrical theory in school but really how to design a board, and how does - - I just finished a podcast today with Julie Ellis who's a Field Applications Engineer from TTM - what about stack-up? What about all these variables and how they come into play, that are not taught at university? But I love that you've brought them in at a university level because I think these are the kids - I think these are exactly who's going to fill some of those shoes, and they may be EEs laying out boards, they may end up like Rick Hartley did saying, I like just designing boards better than circuit design. Who knows? We don't know.

What has been some of your surprises by the way? What feedback from students?

So I think two things absolutely surprise me; one is, their lack of experience with oscilloscopes. That their way of using oscilloscope is first to push the autoscale button. And I slap their wrist if I catch them doing that, or pushing every button without knowing what it is until they see something, on the screen...

Until the light goes on, they're looking for the LED.

-and and so they, just the basic understanding of what an oscilloscope does and how to control the vertical/ horizontal and the trigger. You know the very basic things. A lot of these kids; nobody's ever sat them down and talked to them about it, so we focus on good - again - best measurement practices in the class as well as the design. The second thing is, there is a disconnect between what you learn in the textbook and what you see in the real world and it's the same thing, but you have to know how to apply what you learn in the textbook. And I don't think any university does enough of that hands-on, real-world activity. We try to do it a lot at CU, we have a lot of projects that students get involved in. Most of them are really about designing a little robot or designing some gadget that does something with the code that you write in there. So a lot of it is - some software, as well as the hardware.

But in our class we try to close the loop of the; here I do an estimate or calculation, and here I do a measurement. Like one of the first labs we do is blowing up traces.

That's fun! It is. Everybody likes blowing up something.

Everybody likes to blow shit up

[laughter].

And so the question, the first question I ask them is: okay, you're gonna lay out a board and you're gonna put some tracer - what line width should you use? You can select it to be anything you want.What line width should you use?

And so one of the things that surprised me is, when I asked the students is, they thought that a six mm wide line, just the narrowest that most fab shops will do. A six mm wide line, was too narrow because it's way too much resistance, or I can't put more than a couple milliamps of current through it. So I gotta use a twenty mm wide line, or fifty mm wide line. And it's the kind of thing that, the very first day in class, we calculate or we look at how do you calculate the resistance of a trace? How do you calculate what the maximum current handling it, using the IPC guidelines that Doug Brooks has been so heavily involved in.

And when you put in the numbers you realize: oh my gosh, it looks really narrow on this board it's only six mm wide but but gosh; it's resistance is going to be still in the tens hundreds of milli ohms for typical lengths. So it really isn't that high a resistance even though it looks really narrow because copper is an incredibly good conductor.

Exactly.

People don't have good calibration of that. And then, so I'll give you the number, and I hope none of my students are listening to this because they're gonna figure it out in class. But if you look in the IPC specs for maximum current handling for a six mm wide surface trace; it's like two amps or three amps and when we put two amps through, we have a test board with the different line widths on them. When you put six amp - - two amps through it, you find we can monitor the voltage across it with constant current and see the voltage increasing because it gets hotter, as you see the beginning of the runway, and RNDF around three amps, IPC's around two amps, around three amps, darned if it doesn't go to thermal runaway and we zap the trace and so, you can really get a good estimate by putting in the numbers ahead of time, of how some of these interconnects are going to behave.

But it's that habit of putting in the numbers doing simple estimates, applying what we learn in class to the real world, that the students don't have that good experience with and that's what we try to do in our class at CU.

Well to your point of hands-on, I feel like that's something that for whatever reason has left our education system too much right there's no shop at school anymore, there's no metal, there's no like just - and it's not just, what they would consider low labor skills or whatever. It's just hands-on learning the kinesthetics of it because I bet you dollars to doughnuts that kid, is gonna remember blowing up a three amp trace, more than if he read something about it in a book right?

Right, and sees the smoke and it pops and, there's this feedback well, what I was telling you about is, again one of my favorite parts of my job is, we just came back about three weeks ago from filming these kids that are doing the Hyperloop Competition -

Oh I'm gonna send you this video Eric - you're gonna die because what they do is so awesome and it's just because they get to do hands-on and they make a good - - there's no way they're not making, more mistakes per minute than everybody else in their field, but because of that and because the lack of constraints they have on them as far as businesses and law and whatever, you know this one team we sponsor is from Munich Germany, they just broke the world speed record inside the tube that Elon built at 290 miles per hour.

Crushing!

There's commercial  companies with venture capitalists that haven't hit that number. Because they're young and they're hungry and they're hands-on, and they're excited. But these are the kids who I think, there needs to be much more of what you're doing. I wish every University would, hopefully you'll set an example that others will follow. And by the way, I've cited your course to a group of six universities I was invited to speak at UCSD, UC Davis was there, five other universities and I put a screenshot of your course -

Oh that's great

-and so I, so if you start getting weird phone calls...

(laughter]

-because I'm like see what he's doing - you all need to do this you know, so hopefully the word will spread but until that happens things like the Hyperloop competition, the FSEA competition, where kids get to get their hands on it and blow stuff up and do it wrong, until they do it right, and learn how to use an oscilloscope in this really hands-on manner well these kids are coming out of college and the internships of these kids, one of these kids from University Wisconsin in the Hyperloop team he's a Qualcomm right now, the team lead is going to SpaceX on internship - companies are plucking them out because of the hands-on. So I think the more we sort of beat this drum and spread this message, I again, something I'm very passionate about - I know you are too - and thank you so much for doing that course and we cannot wait to hear from you and about Living in the White Space at AltiumLive.

Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule.

Well I look forward to seeing you at AltiumLive and all the other viewers that you have and I hope folks come up in and say hi while I'm over there.

Okay will do, and make sure - well not make sure - see if we can get LeCroy and company to bring out an oscilloscope so you can - -

We will definitely have one at our table.

Okay good, good I think that would be something notable and something that people, the attendees would enjoy so thank you again Eric this has been...

Thank you Judy.

Thank you again, this has been Judy Warner with Altium's OnTrack podcast and Dr. Eric Bogatin of Teledyne LeCroy. We look forward to being with you next time. Until then, remember to always stay on track.