When passive heat management isn’t enough, fans or blowers are “cool” solutions.

It has been said that good things come in small packages. This is true of electronics up to a point. Chip companies compete for bragging rights over package size. Less is more. Increased density permits faster operation due to reduced lag in shorter traces. This trend extends beyond just chips; shrinking the entire product represents a significant “marketing breakthrough.”

Meanwhile, a compact board will have more wattage to dissipate per unit area. The power supplies are spread around the board with dedicated regulators assigned to each chip even when the voltage requirements are the same from one device to another.

When should you use partitions?

Looking at a spread of components on a printed circuit board without any connections complete can be intimidating. Where does one start?

That question was too much to answer for one of my colleagues back in the day. He was a deer in the headlights, unable to move forward after placing both sides of the board.

The board in question, called the integrated module, was intended to replace a collection of five boards with various functions. It was a 10-layer, double-sided HDI board at a time when HDI was not yet a common thing. It was the most complex board for the company up to that point (Figure 1). One of the evergreen rules of a startup is to do whatever you must to succeed.