In the world of EDA tools, there is a factor that may inhibit you or your colleagues from a desire to change to or consider other EDA tools. It is not apparent, yet it is well studied. Your hesitation may be an aspect of procedural memory commonly referred to as muscle memory.
Continue reading Of Muscle Memory and Game Controllers
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.
Continue reading The Dedicated PCB Layout Artist – Is This a Sustainable Profession?
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.
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.
