PCB design & layout
Product design & engineering
839 episodes across 36 shows cover PCB design & layout. The shows that cover it most are The Amp Hour, Hackaday Podcast and Embedded.fm. The most recent, from 7 Oct 2026, is “PCB Connectors That Survive Space, Shock & 500 Thermal Cycles” from OnTrack.
Schematics and board layout, stack-ups, signal integrity, EMC-aware layout and PCB fabrication choices.
839 episodes from 36 shows, most relevant and most recent first.
839 episodes
PCB Connectors That Survive Space, Shock & 500 Thermal Cycles
Shane Dabrowski, a Field Applications Engineer at Samtec, explains how the company’s Severe Environment Testing (SET) and MIL-DTL-55302 lot-based testing validate standard connectors for military, aerospace, and LEO satellite applications…
AI PCB Routing Without the Epic Fails: Inside DeepPCB
Alain-Sam Cohen and Nabil Chouba of InstaDeep’s DeepPCB explain how their reinforcement-learning routing engine, paired with the natural-language orchestrator Cooper, detects design intent like net classes and impedance before routing…
Solving the Hard Problems: Combining AI and Physics for PCB Design
Sergiy Nesterenko, founder and CEO of Quilter, explains how his company uses reinforcement learning and computational physics to automate PCB layout, aiming to create a 'compiler' for electronics that handles the entire design scope. He…
The Signal Integrity Tool Every Engineer Is Missing
David Banas, a Solutions Engineer at Keysight, discusses three open-source Python packages—PyBERT, PyIBIS-AMI, and PyChopMarge—that provide accessible alternatives to expensive commercial signal integrity simulation tools. He demonstrates…
S7E2 WEBINAR: Your Manufacturer is Stupid: Why Your Circuit Board Design Is Making Their Job Harder with Chris Denney
Chris Denney, CTO of Worthington Assembly and Circuit Hub, explains how PCB design choices directly impact manufacturing efficiency and cost. He details five critical areas for mechanical and electrical engineers: ensuring component…
Can AI Design IoT Hardware? | Flux's Matthias Wagner | Internet of Things Podcast
Matthias Wagner, Founder and CEO of Flux, explains how his company uses agentic AI to democratize PCB design, allowing non-engineers to create hardware via natural language prompts. He discusses the historical bottlenecks of hardware…
Agile Hardware Development with Gregor Gross
Gregor Gross, founder of Alpha-board, a Berlin-based PCB design and agile hardware development service, explains how his company applies agile principles to hardware projects where fixed-price contracts are the norm. He details practical…
Electronica 24: The Crucial Role of PCBs and Advanced IC Substrates with Matthias Pirs from AT&S
Matthias Pirs, Director of Corporate Affairs at AT&S, discusses the company's strategic transition from high-end PCBs to advanced IC substrates for the semiconductor industry. He highlights a 500-million-euro investment in Austria to…
Beyond Automation: Self-Verifying AI Agents for Semiconductor and PCB Design
Amit Gupta, Chief AI Strategy Officer at Siemens EDA, and Tim Costa, VP and GM of Industrial and Computational Engineering at NVIDIA, discuss their collaboration to build self-verifying AI agents for semiconductor and PCB design. They…
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino)
George Cozma of Chips and Cheese joins Bryan Cantrill, Robert Mustacchi, and the Oxide team to discuss AMD's 5th Gen EPYC processor, codename Turin, and Oxide's development of their next-generation Turin-based platform, Cosmo. The…
PCB Metrology Gap: How SCAN Labs Is Automating Microsectioning
Geoffrey Leeds, founder of SCAN Labs, explains the 'metrology gap' between semiconductor and PCB industries, detailing how his company automates microsectioning to provide high-fidelity data for high-reliability sectors. He describes a…
High-Speed Interconnects for AI & Physical AI with Samtec
Matt Burns, Director of Technical Marketing at Samtec, discusses the evolution of high-speed interconnects for AI data centers and embedded systems. He explains how connector selection has shifted from an afterthought to a critical…
Exploring Mycronic's Bold Innovations and Global Strategies with Clemens Jargon
Clemens Jargon, Senior VP High Flex at Mycronic AB, discusses the company's comprehensive portfolio of SMT solutions, including jet printing, screen printing, SPI, and material handling systems. He highlights the new A40 pick-and-place…
IPC 2221 vs. 2152: The Truth About PCB Trace Current Ratings
Mike Jouppi, formerly of the IPC 2152 Task Force, joins host Zach Peterson to explain why the IPC 2221 standard’s internal trace charts are misleading because they were derived from traces removed from the board and tested in free air, not…
Building Together: Oxide and Samtec
Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company discuss their partnership with Samtec, featuring guests Jonathan Ghesh and Jignesh Khanna, to build the Oxide Rack using flyover cable systems instead of traditional PCB…
All About Antennas with Katerina Galitskaya
Katerina Galitskaya, a Senior Antenna Engineer, explains the physics of antenna design, emphasizing that ground plane size is critical for efficiency and that lower frequencies require larger PCB areas. She outlines practical rules for PCB…
Paradromics CEO Matt Angle on building the highest data rate brain-computer interface, hermetic sealing vs. Neuralink, and what makes BCIs last a decade in the body.
Matt Angle, CEO of Paradromics, explains the engineering behind the Connexus brain-computer interface, which achieves over 200 bits per second and is designed to last more than a decade in the body. He contrasts Paradromics' hermetic…
Chris Denney | PCB Design, Fabrication, & Manufacturing
Chris Denney, CTO at Worthington Assembly, discusses the complexities of small-volume PCB assembly, contrasting the 'one to 100 piece' prototype range with the new challenges of scaling to 10,000-piece monthly orders. He explains that…
Bringup Lab Chronicles: A Measurement Two Years in the Making
Oxide Computer Company electrical engineers Ariane, Eric, and Tom detail the two-year effort to bring up a 100Gb backplane link, utilizing Teledyne LeCroy VNAs and TDRs to measure signal integrity. They explain how a missing 100Ω…
EP 192: Talking Apple Silicon with Apple's Tom Boger, Kaiann Drance, and Sri Santhanam
Tom Boger, Kaiann Drance, and Sri Santhanam from Apple discuss the transition to 2-nanometer process technology across the A20 Pro and M-series chips, highlighting the shift to a dual neural engine and unified memory architecture. They…
Advanced Packaging & Chiplet Design with Chipletz
Stephen Newberry, Victor Kronberg, and Ching-Ping Wong from Chipletz, a fabless advanced packaging company, discuss their technical paper presented at DesignCon on the wallstrip transmission line. They explain how this novel die-to-die…
Why 90% of Electronics Fail EMC Tests and How to Fix It
Karen Burnham, chief engineer and founder of EMC United, explains why 60-90% of electronics fail EMC tests on the first attempt, citing counterintuitive antenna effects and misleading data sheet advice like ground plane splits. She details…
The Return to the Chamber of Mysteries
Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company are joined by Robert "RFK" Keith, Dan Chirpich, and Stu Donnan to discuss the company's recent struggle with FCC EMC compliance for their next-generation rack. The team details…
EMC Expert Debunks Common PCB Grounding Myths
Todd Hubing, president of LearnEMC, explains that grounding myths stem from confusing signal integrity return paths with EMC ground structures, arguing that high-frequency currents follow the path of least impedance and do not cause ground…
123: The Last Detail with John Siracusa
John Siracusa, proprietor of Hypercritical.co and co-host of the Accidental Tech Podcast, discusses the 2019 Mac Pro, which he calls the 'cheese grater.' He details its industrial design, including the iconic perforated aluminum front…
When Nine Nines Isn't Enough
Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company, joined by Nathanael Huffman, Alan Hanson, Cliff Biffle, Eric Aasen, Robert Keith, and Jordan Hendricks, detail a two-and-a-half-year investigation into mysterious hardware…
Footprints and Symbols with Natasha Baker
Natasha Baker, Founder and CEO of SnapEDA, explains how her experience at National Instruments and a frustrating project with a Texas Instruments reference design led her to build a centralized library of symbols and footprints for PCB…
E&M Reality Emerges with Robert Fennis
Robert Fennis, creator of the open-source Python-based 3D electromagnetic solver EMerge, explains how to democratize RF simulation by providing an accessible alternative to expensive proprietary tools like HFSS and Ansys. He details the…
532: It's Still Real Fire
Kevin Santo Cappuccio, founder of Architeuthis Flux, discusses Jumperless, an open-source breadboard that replaces physical jumper wires with software-controlled analog crossbar switches and 445 RGB LEDs. He explains the device's…
AI Generative Camera, Pi Pico W Bluetooth, Swift on Hardware, and more!
The host discusses the Raspberry Pi Pico W gaining full Bluetooth support in MicroPython, followed by Paragraphica, a generative AI camera by Bjorn Carmen that uses location data and Stable Diffusion to create images without capturing…
AI PCB Design: Turning a 100-Page Spec Into an MCU Shortlist
Marco Witzmann, Head of Requirements Portal at Altium, demonstrates the new AI-powered engineering assistant within the Altium Requirements Portal, formerly known as Requirements Manager. He walks through a live demo of converting a…
New PCB Assembly Method Promises Higher Reliability & Lower Cost
Ray Rasmussen, Managing Partner at The Occam Group, explains a novel PCB assembly methodology that eliminates solder by embedding components and building copper-to-copper connections using existing factory equipment. He contrasts this…
DeepDive 1-on-1 Series: EXECUTION READINESS - Verifying the Factory Before the Climb (30m42s)
Rob Carl, Founder & CEO of Global NPI Solvers, explains how to verify factory execution readiness before mass production, warning against the 'golden road' tours that hide cultural and process gaps. He details the risks of 'perfect…
Where it comes up20:21
High Power PCB Design: Pushing the Limits with Caleb Buck
Caleb Buck, a PCB Design Electronics Engineer at Nidec Aerospace, discusses the complexities of high-power PCB design, ranging from guitar pedal prototypes to aerospace systems handling over 500 amps. He explains how uneven current…
DeepDive 1-on-1 Series: MAPPING THE ROUTE - Path to the Summit (20m32s)
Rob Carl, Founder & CEO of Global NPI Solvers, explains the 'Pre-Ascent Protocol' for New Product Introduction, arguing that a working prototype is merely a sketch, not a map to mass production. He details how 'architecture freeze' on…
The EMS (Eric Miscoll Show) - Is Inspection Leading the AI Revolution in Manufacturing?
Oshri Cohen, CEO of Cybord, and Joel Scutchfield, General Manager of SMT and Semicon Business Operations for Koh Young America, discuss how AI is transforming inspection in electronics manufacturing. They explain that while traditional…
How Automation And Flying Probe Are Redrawing ICT Strategy with Seica's Luca Corli
Luca Corli of Seica discusses the launch of the Valid SL, an inline in-circuit tester designed for large, thick boards with over 4,000 pins, and the Valid LR, which allows the reuse of legacy bed-of-nails fixtures from multiple vendors…
Compact High Speed Design with Lukas Henkel
Lukas Henkel, CEO of OV Tech, discusses the design of high-density, open-source System-in-Package (SIP) modules and a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) replacement called PyMix 8. He explains the engineering challenges of…
Startup to Award Winner: Exploring Stentech's Innovations with co-founder Sergio Juarez Madrid
Sergio Juarez Madrid, co-founder and Mexico GM of Stentech, discusses the company's evolution from its Canadian origins to its current status as an award-winning electronics manufacturing services provider. He highlights the BluePrint…
Where it comes up2:58
Hardware-Software Co-Development with Tobias Kästner
Tobias Kästner, a software architect at Inovex, explains how his team replaced six-month hardware cycles with three-week sprints by breaking monolithic PCB designs into modular 'feature boards' connected via shields. He details using Git…
Inside Simberian's AI-Driven Design Automation
Yuriy Shlepnev, founder of Simberian, discusses the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into signal integrity (SI) workflows via Simbeor Commander. He contrasts this agentic approach with previous machine learning attempts that…
High Current PDN Design: Engineer of the Year Reveals Industry Secrets
Ben Dannan, founder of Signal Edge Solutions and DesignCon's Engineer of the Year, discusses the engineering challenges of designing 2,000-amp power distribution networks (PDN) for high-power AI processors like NVIDIA's Blackwell platform…
PCB Assembly and Design for Manufacturing with Duane Benson of Screaming Circuits
Duane Benson, Director of Marketing at Screaming Circuits, explains the PCB assembly process, contrasting their prototype/small-volume model with parent company Milwaukee Electronics' high-volume contract manufacturing. He details the…
Structural Electronics in Altium Designer: 3D PCB Designs Explained
Jack Henriques, product manager at Altium, demonstrates structural electronics functionality in Altium Designer, covering 3D PCB designs, printed electronics, and 3D-MIDs. He explains how the software handles routing on curved surfaces…
The State of Multi-Die Testing: Essential Insights for Designers
Faisal Goriawala, principal product manager at Synopsys, explains the complexities of multi-die testing for 2.5D and 3DIC packages, distinguishing it from traditional monolithic testing by highlighting the need for pre-bond, mid-bond, and…
Safety and Efficiency in Robotics Design
Giovanni Campanella, General Manager of Industrial Automation and Robotics at Texas Instruments, discusses TI's comprehensive portfolio for robotics, including processors, sensors, and wide bandgap (GaN) power electronics. He explains how…
Welding with an HDMI Cable
Dave Jones and Chris Gammell discuss the recent acquisition of Arduino by Gonski, analyzing the financials and predicting a shift toward subscription models, while detailing the new Arduino Uno Q board which combines STM32 and Linux…
IBM Used Mathematics as Compass on Journey to NorthPole
Dr. Dharmendra Modha, IBM’s chief scientist for brain-inspired computing, explains how his team moved from the TrueNorth chip to the NorthPole inference system by prioritizing mathematical axioms over biological replication. He details how…
494: All Tech Is Wearable
Debra Ansell, known as GeekMomProjects, discusses her winning entry for the Hackaday Supercon badge add-on contest: a flexible, bendy PCB structure called the 'Bendy SAO' that mimics a wacky waving inflatable tube man. She details the…
Applied Embedded Electronics with Jerry Twomey
Jerry Twomey, author of 'Applied Embedded Electronics' and founder of Effective Electrons, discusses his consulting work helping companies like Dexcom and IBM build reliable embedded systems. He emphasizes that robust design requires…