Planning on Hanging Your Technical Shingle?

If you are like most engineers, you may be frustrated with the day-to-day grind of the office place.  No one seems to listen to ideas and concerns.  No one seems to have the energy or drive to take things to the next level of excellence. Promotions and opportunities never seem to come your way.  The extra work and effort are hardly appreciated, if at all.  Management seems to be making a lot of money without doing much or even bothering to understand what’s being done.

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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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Dealing with ODBC 32/64-bit Database Compatibility Issues in Altium Designer

With the 64-bit Altium Designer Version 18 release, there may be some compatibility issues that arise when installing a database library. Though this document focuses on Microsoft Access, the same concept is true for any type of database.

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Rick Hartley’s Reading List

Our July webinar with Rick Hartley was well received.  He was kind enough to provide a recommended reading list.  If you are interested in the recording, please click here.

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Understanding Component Library Management

At the Del Mar Electronics Show in 2013, I had an opportunity to meet the publisher of US Tech. As a result of the meeting, I was given the opportunity to write about component library issues. The article below was to test the waters to see if there would be any response. The idea was to start a series on the topic of libraries. This article focuses on the need for a good bill of materials.

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Verification Engineers Can Aid Test

This article was written in the waning days of Tality. I had started in the Test and Prototyping group at Cadence and had worked my way into the ASIC design group 4 years later. One of my first efforts in the group was to write a test bench for a particular ASIC that would eventually be used to produce the vector “dumps”. These data “dumps” would be massaged for the test systems.

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Working for Tality

My first job out of college was working for Cadence Design Systems in San Diego. At the time, Joe Costello was the CEO. He was very charismatic, and working for Cadence was truly exciting. The quarterly meetings were known as “The Joe Show.” You didn’t want to miss it because Joe aimed to entertain when he spoke.

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