Bookshelf

The Bookshelf is a selection of links to background material on digital design and construction. Some other web sites that contain useful links are listed at the bottom.

Keeping Current

Any self-respecting electronics geek has a subscription to Circuit Cellar.
Also consider a subscription to Nuts & Volts. It's a little lower-level than Circuit Cellar.
Servo is a more specialized magazine for robotics. I find it a bit cheesy but it may be good for high-school/middle-school students.
If you're working in the industry you probably already have a subscription to EE Times and/or EDN.

Microcontroller Programming

Microchip has some interesting application notes on doing neat/tricky things with microcontrollers:

Here are some tips on using a micro to read three states from one pin, generate high voltages, read a sensor with high accuracy, implement a delta-sigma converter, and other neat things.
Here are some specific tips for using comparators to simulate A/D converters, implement delta-sigma converters, and other neat things.

Microcontrollers are hard enough to debug as it is without having bad coding practices get in the way. Here are some links to recommended C programming practices:

The updated "Indian Hill" guidelines are timeless and highly recommended.

PCB Manufacturing & Assembly

Here is an article entitled "Surface Mount Zero Defect Design Checklist" with a very thorough description of how to properly incorporate SMT devices into your design for good manufacturability.
Some documents from Precision Circuits provide very good guidelines on design rules and other information on manufacturing. Make sure you check out:
- CID-009, Manufacturing PCB's - An Overview
- CID-015, Design Rules
- CID-016, Track to Board Edge Design Guidelines
- CID-017, Hole to Pad Design Guidelines
- CID-019, SMT Design Guidelines
- CID-022, Finding the Solder Mask for Your Needs
- CID-030, Printed Circuit Board Specifications
EverythingPCB has an extensive list of links for the PCB industry
Here is a list of PCB assembly requirements from Dynamic Details, Inc. that introduces fiducials, tooling holes, etc.

Lab Technique

Good Crimps and How To Recognize Them, a good technical note from Molex on proper crimping technique

Heat Sinking

Aavid Thermalloy has some good technical papers on heat and heat sinks. Here are some of the more relevant papers:
- How to Size Heat Sinks for Semiconductors
- The Basics of Package/Device Cooling
- Optimum Design and Selection of Heat Sinks
- As Cool as a Cucumber, Managing the Heat Produced by IC Developments

Optical Isolation

An article on optocouplers and their role in high-speed communication in noisy environments

Test Equipment

Tektronix has a great tutorial on oscilloscopes including nomenclature, techniques, etc.

Capacitors

An introduction to capacitor ESR
A capacitor term glossary
How to interpret capacitor code markings
Tons of additional capacitor links
This document explains the different ceramic capacitor temperatures codes such as X7R and Z5U.

Component Packaging

This IPC land calculator is a handy tool for getting footprints of various IC packages. When designing your own part libraries, it can sometimes be tough to find just the right land pattern.

Interesting Technologies

Handshake Solutions has developed clockless or asynchronous logic technology. This interesting technology, as its name implies, allows for the design of digital logic without clock signals.
Camgian Microsystems is another company with a clockless technology.

Analog Circuit Design

Here is a very good guide to instrumentation amplifiers.

Signal Integrity

The wcalc program is an on-line calculator of transmission line parameters for microstrips, coax, etc. There are also off-line library routines that can be embedded in MATLAB code, Scilab code, etc.
This MuRata web site has some good information on sources of EMI, how it relates to PCB layout, how to use EMI filters on signal traces, etc. It also includes actual spectra to illustrate the effects of filtering and proper PCB layout.