The Dedicated PCB Layout Artist – Is This a Sustainable Profession?

The August 2017 edition of Printed Circuit Design and Fab Circuits Assembly acknowledged what many of us PCB designers have suspected; there is a strong need to train young people in the art of PCB design.  It is becoming a lost art in a time when it is ever so needed.  With the current technological upswing, it is truly a great time to be an experienced PCB designer.  But while being an experienced PCB designer is one thing, getting more people to embrace a job as a dedicated PCB designer is another.

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Detangling a Power Short

Preface:  Mark Saunders is currently a senior at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  He is one of the few undergraduate students with a working knowledge of PCB design.  Although his focus is firmware, he has used Altium Designer for several personal and class projects.

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Know Your Customer

Why the ‘Golden Demo’ Isn’t So Golden!

When I was an application engineer at Altium, I was given the task of creating a golden demo which we would use for a weekly webinar.  A colleague of mine and I managed to pull together a rather intricate 45-minute script that would demonstrate numerous functions of Altium Designer.  Granted, I knew nothing about marketing and I was coming into this job after a decade of test and integration engineering.

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INTERVIEW: Good Design Instruction is a True Value-Add

This is an interview conducted by the editor, Andy Shaughnessy, of I-Connect007 with Paul Taubman back on November 9, 2017.

Nine Dot Connects has certainly blazed an interesting trail. The company started out as an Altium reseller, but in less than a decade, Nine Dot Connects has also become a design service bureau and a provider of PCB design instruction, training, and consulting services. A quick scan through their webpage reveals dozens of archived PCB design webinars, all neatly organized by category.

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