08-03-2023

If there is one thing that helped my career in printed circuit board design more than anything else, it would be my time working at a service bureau. Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted with the different captive shops I’ve worked for in larger companies throughout my career. Over the years, these organizations have provided the opportunity to lay out boards for computer systems, test equipment, display hardware, and much more. But in all those captive shops, the board types have usually been pretty much the same, which stands to reason when you consider the type and range of products sold by each parent corporation. The service bureau, however, was a different story.

06-08-2023

Imagine being a rookie stepping up to the plate for the first time. Consider the incredible focus it takes to evaluate the situation and correctly anticipate the trajectory of a ball traveling toward you at around 90 mph. At the same time, you must block out that every move you make is being scrutinized by thousands of park spectators and millions of TV viewers. The pressure must be unimaginable. People step up to the plate every day to perform their jobs. While not staring down a pitch, they are sizing up their own skills, experiences, and untold variables to achieve the best possible result. Their need to “hit it out of the park” in their job is just as important as it is to a major league baseball player.

04-07-2023

There’s a lot that can be said about the pros and cons of tribal knowledge in the workplace and there really is more than one definition. To put it simply, tribal knowledge is information or skills known by an individual or group that is not known outside of that group. One of the trademarks of this definition is that it’s commonly used to describe functional—but undocumented—knowledge essential to the operation of an organization. Of course, this is a broad generalization and just one definition of tribal knowledge, but it will do for our purposes.

01-18-2023

Last week my wife started a new project that required a trip to the craft store for supplies, and she invited me to join her on this errand. This is not the first time I’ve faced this scenario; do I choose to follow her around the craft store pushing the miniature cart that will, by the time we get to the register, barely contain all her chosen fabrics and materials, or stay at home and watch TV? Thankfully, by this point in my life, I’ve learned which is the right choice, so we hopped in the car and headed down the road to the craft store.

11-22-2022

Although it’s been more years than I care to admit, I still remember very clearly the class on careers that I was required to take in junior high school. On a table in the front of the class were several boxes filled with all sorts of different job cards that a student would search through to learn about different professions. Each card listed the schooling and experience required for that particular job, its expected responsibilities and duties, and an estimated salary. Our assignment was to choose a handful of these cards that interested us, study them, and then list the reasons why we would or wouldn’t pursue those jobs as a career. As you might have guessed, I blew the assignment.

10-06-2022

Bruno Gaido was a young radioman-gunner portrayed by Nick Jonas in the 2019 movie “Midway.” An early scene shows a Japanese bomber trying to sink the USS Enterprise by crashing into it with his plane. The scene shows the bravery of Bruno as he ran across the deck of the ship and jumped into the rear seat of a parked airplane, using its guns to shoot back. His shooting damaged the bomber just enough to force it off course, thereby saving the ship just as the bomber crashed into the Bruno’s plane, cutting the plane in half and made it spin around. We can learn a lot from the confidence of Bruno Gaido.

08-04-2022

It was the end of May, which among other things, meant that the Major League Baseball season was once again in full swing (pun intended). While my wife was happily settled into the couch with her Seattle Mariners cap, T-shirt, blanket, and coffee mug cheering on J.P Crawford and the rest of the team, I re-watched “Field of Dreams,” and was again mesmerized by the voice that speaks to Kevin Costner’s character: “If you build it, they will come.” As circuit board designers, it’s probably not all that unusual to hear similar voices speaking to us, especially after staring at a layout for hours, and hours, and hours. But in our case, the message is typically a little different, and sounds more like, “If you document it correctly, they will build it.”

06-02-2022

What skills actually prepare you for your future career? Tim Haag reflects back on an eighth grade typing class that baffled those around him because "everyone knew that I had absolutely no aptitude for any sort of literary or language skills." Yet, despite his atrocious spelling skills, Tim excelled in typing and those newly-honed skills served him well as he began to learn about laying out circuit boards on various computer design systems. It was one random decision amongst so many others. What was it for you?

03-22-2022

Sometimes I am really envious of those who work with steel, on a construction site, or even tilling the earth. All of these are tangible activities; you mold the steel, or build a house, or harvest a crop. Instead, I work in electronics. Most of the time it is a good life, but every now and then a nasty little gremlin will pop up its ugly head and mock you. It could be a circuit that just won’t give you the performance that you need, a short that you can’t find, or worst of all, an intermittent problem that just won’t go away.

01-27-2022

If you’ve read my column before you know how much of a fan I am of aviation, especially when it comes to older airplanes. You can imagine how ecstatic I was when 11 years ago my wife gave me the greatest gift of all; a half-hour ride on a fully restored WWII B-17 Flying Fortress. This plane was the real deal folks. A four-engine heavy bomber stuffed with gun turrets, narrow and cramped crew areas, and the cold hard metal of unforgiving hardware that could give you a serious bruise on the forehead if you weren’t paying attention. From wingtip to wingtip, the “Liberty Belle” was saturated with a rich ambiance of history that emanated from every one of her nearly 400,000 rivets that held this aircraft together.

11-24-2021

There are a lot of different types of “collections” in life that need managing, and like my proliferating pile of tax paper publications, they all need their own eloquent solutions to keep from getting out of control. Take for instance the amount of data that is generated during the design of electronics. The first thing to consider in our world of PCB design is just how much data there is that needs to be managed. From a casual overview it may not seem that extensive, but let’s break the average design down into its four separate pieces. This gives us the schematic, circuit simulation, PCB layout, and analysis, and that is just a generalization. Designs often have more pieces than that in them, especially when you consider the depth of system level design.

09-24-2021

Circuit board design used to be a more complicated and lengthy process than it is now with the need to build scores of test circuits, develop multiple prototypes, and toiling with manual design operations. The one good thing about all of this time was that it gave ample opportunity for everyone to be involved.

07-14-2021

Who inspires you to be a better designer? For Tim Haag, he finds motivation in the story of Bert Christman. Read on for how this daring Navy pilot's life relates to advice in the world of circuit board design.

05-21-2021

Tim's fishing story relates well to designing circuit boards. Intrigued? Read on, he explains how "there's always a bigger fish."

01-25-2021

When he first started laying out printed circuit boards many years ago, Tim was working for a computer systems manufacturer whose PCB designs were all multilayer boards. While there were a great many things that I learned during my time working there, it also fostered one bad habit; He became accustomed to relying on being able to use multiple layers for routing instead of planning a more efficient layout. Here, he breaks it all down.

11-13-2020

Do you remember the old TV show “Stargate SG-1?” With the exhortation of “SG-1, you have a go” from their commanding officer, the stargate would instantaneously transport an intrepid band of heroes to new and exciting locations each week. Tim Haag details his realization that the stargate is nothing more than a giant via in space!

09-09-2020

If there’s one thing in life that really feels the pressure of being in the hot seat, it’s the PCBs that we design. But PCB designers often feel a lot of pressure while doing their work, which puts them squarely in the hot seat. Tim Haag shares four techniques in thermal management for PCB designers.

05-29-2020

While some expectations are normal—and, well, expected—in the workplace, there are also those that do more harm than good. Tim Haag unpacks negative expectations and shares suggestions for improving communication in the workplace, as well as positive expectations that you can set for yourself.

03-24-2020

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, many people who have worked in an office environment for their entire career have suddenly found themselves shifted to working remotely. At first, this may seem like it isn’t that big of a change, but it may be a bigger deal than you realize. Tim Haag, who has worked from home for over 17 years, shares five tips for making the most of this situation and working successfully from home.

02-14-2020

My first “real” job in the world of electronics was working at a Radio Shack store back in the late ‘70s. It was a step up from flipping burgers, but it didn’t last long. However, there was one notable aspect of that job; I was there during the time that Radio Shack introduced its first personal computer—the TRS-80. Although it is practically unimaginable now, in those days, there wasn’t much in the way of personal computing available for the general consumer.

10-09-2019

To the untrained eye, one circuit board may look pretty much like any other, but as we know, there are major differences between them. Not only are they different in purpose and design but also in how they are manufactured for specific industries. If you are designing medical equipment, for instance, you will have to meet many different regulatory requirements from organizations, such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), World Health Organization (WHO), and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), among others.

07-10-2019

Whether baking a cake or building a circuit board, it’s all about clear communication. If the person writing the recipe had not made the choice to clearly communicate what their intentions were for baking that cake, I would have been lost. A missing ingredient here or an incorrect oven temperature there and my birthday surprise would have ended up in the garbage in the same way a successfully built circuit board starts with clear communication from the designer. Circuit board manufacturers want to create a perfect PCB for you, but they can only do so to the extent of the instructions that you give them.

06-20-2019

Driving rules are designed to keep drivers between the lines of traffic instead of crossing over those lines into dangerous situations. Similarly, design rules are also intended to keep PCB trace routing between the lines instead of crossing over them as well. But you might be surprised how many people refuse to use the full potential of their DRCs to protect themselves, and in some cases, refuse to use them at all.

04-08-2019

Many years ago, my boss at a PCB design service bureau had his own unique way of encouraging us to take a break. He would come through the design bay and call out in his deep baritone voice, “DARTS!” and we would all follow him into the break area for a quick game. In addition to the benefits of taking a break, forcing our eyes to focus in and out as we threw a dart was a great way to relieve us all from the eye strain of older CRT monitors.

02-28-2019

I get it. We PCB designers are made of the kind of tough stuff where we will work ourselves to death if given the chance. But in our all of our efforts, are we really doing it right, or could we somehow be doing it better? Let’s take a moment to consider some other ways that we might help ourselves to improve.