PCB - an Overview

A PCB (Printed Circuit Board) is the base of any circuit that is used to provide mechanical support to components of the circuit and make electrical connections between them. It has tracks or signal traces etched from copper sheets laminated onto a non-conductive substrate. It is also called as printed wiring board (PWB) or Etched wiring board

PCBs are inexpensive and more reliable than the bread boards. They provide the stability to the circuit. Although, they require much more layout efforts and higher initial costs than either wire wrap or point-to-point construction, but Printed Circuit Boards are much cheaper and faster for high-volume production. The production and soldering of PCBs can be done by totally automated equipment. Much of the electronics industry's PCB design, assembly, and quality control needs are set by standards that are published by the IPC organization

The Printed Circuit Board Manufacturing Process

The design process of a printed circuit board includes several steps. They are manufactured on home by hands as well as by automated machines in industries. On the large scale there are all automatic machines that do everything. But if you are an electronic hobbyist and need to design a PCB for your small project, you can do it yourself at home with just little stuff required.

These are the steps that need to follow while making a PCB:

    ·        Patterning | Etching

    ·        Photoengraving

    ·        Lamination

    ·        Drilling.

    ·        Solder Plating | Solder Resist

    ·        Silk Screen

    ·        Testing

Mechatronics - An Overview

Mechatronics is an integration of different engineering systems including mechanics, electronics and computer science. Mechatronics is widely applied in everyday life for solutions ranging from optical telecommunication to transportation and biomedical engineering.

Mechatronics-enabled systems are efficient and reliable, and have microcontrollers to ensure smooth functioning and higher dependability. These systems have sensors to absorb signals from the surroundings, and use appropriate processing to generate acquired output signals. The principles of mechatronics are regularly applied to robots, automated guided vehicles, digitally controlled combust engines, aircraft flight control and navigation systems, and smart home appliances.

A mechatronics system includes a measurement and actutation module, a communication module, a CPU, an output signal conditioning module, and a feedback module.

A measurement and actutation module comprises of actuators and sensors to receive and reply to signals.

A communication module comprises of circuits and bus communication in order to generate signals by measuring the relative position of actuators and sensors. These singals are then transferred to the CPU. 

The CPU recieves the signal and performs logical and arithmetic operations with a processor and software.

An output signal conditioning module includes amplifiers to drive plotter, audio-visual indicators, ADC/DAC’s and displays. The output signal is forwarded to feedback module. 

The feedback module generates signal proportional to the output signal which is finally forwarded to the measurement and actuation module. 

The main focus of research in the mechatronics domain is the application of electronics, controls, communications and computational intelligence to manufacturing systems and processes. A typical mechatronics system would a device designed to improve the physical interaction between humans and machines. This makes it easier for an operator to interact with the system with little physical effort. 

Currently, researchers are using mechatronics to improve quality of machines in the following spheres: body implants to improve physiological condition, robotics, military robotics, 3d manufacturing, and unmanned robots for oceanographic exploration.

PLCC Technology - Introduction

PLCC (Power Line Carrier Communication) is a network technology mostly used in Telecommunication.

It uses power lines (electricity network supply) as a carrier to transmit signal from one host to another. PLC networks are both electrical supply networks and communication channels at a time. So it has emerged as an economic solution for communication channel and strongly competing WLAN and other network technologies.

Basic principle behind Power Line Carrier Communication is amplitude modulation. At the transmission point a high-frequency (1.6 to 30mhz), low-amplitude signal is superimposed on a low-frequency (50hz), high amplitude AC signal. Power devices do not care about the added noise as filtering devices extract the high frequency signal without low frequency component at the receiver point. In Telecommunication, before transmission of audio signals through the technology audio signals are compressed in the 300 to 4khz range and then modulated with the electrical signals and then filtered and amplified.
These are the devices that used in PLCC Technology:-
1. modem
2. speech interface module
3. data interface unit
4. power supply unit
5. amplifier
6. line filter

An information channel is used in home same like electricity connections as it required one phase and neutral and we can use three different network channels with a three phase electricity infrastructure.. We can also connect these networks using a coupler.

In Brief, PLCC is a handy technique to create a network on an pre existing channel using the concept of amplitude modulation.

VLSI

VLSI chiefly comprises of Front End Design and Back End design these days. While front end design includes digital design using HDL, design verification through simulation and other verification techniques, the design from gates and design for testability, backend design comprises of CMOS library design and its characterization. It also covers the physical design and fault simulation. While Simple logic gates might be considered as SSI devices and multiplexers and parity encoders as MSI, the world of VLSI Technology is much more diverse. Generally, the entire design procedure follows a step by step approach in which each design step is followed by simulation before actually being put onto the hardware or moving on to the next step.

Where do we actually see VLSI in action? Everywhere, in personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras and any electronic gadget. There are certain key issues that serve as active areas of research and are constantly improving as the field continues to mature. The figures would easily show how Gordon Moore proved to be a visionary while the trend predicted by his law still continues to hold with little deviations and don’t show any signs of stopping in the near future. VLSI has come a far distance from the time when the chips were truly hand crafted. But as we near the limit of miniaturization of Silicon wafers, design issues have cropped up. 

What is FPGA

What is FPGA? Simulations and prototyping have been a very important part of the electronics industry since a very long time now. Before heading in for the actual fabrication of a dedicated hardware, everyone would want to be sure that what they are making will work the way they want it to. Over all these years while electronics companies offered dedicated hardware in their products, it was not possible for the end user to reconfigure them to his own needs. This need led to the growth of a new market segment of customer configurable Field Programmable integrated circuits called Field Programmable Gate Arrays or FPGA.

The FPGAs share a common history with most Programmable Logic Devices. The first of this kind of devices was the Programmable Read Only Memory. Further driven by need of specifically implementing logic circuits, Philips invented the Field-Programmable Logic Array (FPLA) in the 1970s. This consisted of two planes, a programmable wired AND-plane and the other as wired OR. It could implement functions in the Sum of Products form. 

Advanced RISC Machines

By now, there would be a very small segment of the mobile community that would not have heard anything about the Android OS by Google. This OS seems to be giving many proprietary vendors a run for their money and the owners many a sleepless nights. But did you know as to what is android depend on for its good performance apart from its robust code? What makes it run so smooth and yet amazingly fast without costing you a fortune? What drives the Android? The answer is ARM Processor, Advanced RISC Machines, previously known as Acorn RISC Machines.

Inspired by the making of 32 bit processors by some undergraduates at Berkeley and a one man design center Western Design Center, Phoenix, Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson of Acorn Ltd. set out to make their own processors. Sophie developed the instruction set and simulated it on the BBC Basic which convinced many in the company that it was not just anything half hearted shot aimed in darkness. With the support and permission of the then CEO Hermann Hauser, the ARM Processor project formally took off in 1983 with VLSI Technology as their silicon partner, to produce an ARM processor with latencies as low as that of the 6502. The first ARM Processor core dubbed as ARM1 was delivered by VLSI Technology in 1985. This processor used in conjunction with the BBC Micro helped in the development of the next generation called ARM2. 1987 saw the release of ARM Archimedes. 

Android

What is Android?

World is toning with the growth of mobile phone technology. As the no. of users is growing day by day, facilities are also increasing. Starting with simple regular handsets which were used just for making phone calls, mobiles have changed our lives and have turn into part of it. Now they are not used just for making calls but they have numerous uses and can be used as a Camera , Music player, Tablet PC, T.V. , Web browser etc . And with the new technologies, new software and operating systems are required.

Operating systems have developed a lot in last 15 years. Starting from black and white phones to current smart phones or mini computers, mobile OS has come far away. particularly for smart phones, Mobile OS has greatly evolved from Palm OS in 1996 to Windows pocket PC in 2000 then to Blackberry OS and Android.


Read more about What is Android