Columnist Kelly Dack has had a pretty wide range of experiences. As a PCB designer, he has sat behind the desk at an NPI company, an OEM, a fabricator, and now an EMS provider. We asked him to share a few thoughts on the materials selection process and how it could be improved.

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While the layout of the circuit gives us much of the electrical characteristics of the design, your choice of materials can affect the mechanical and electrical characteristics of the circuit. Material choices affect not only the design of the circuit for its environment, but also the manufacturing and assembly processes. While the layout of the circuit gives us much of the electrical characteristics of the design, your choice of materials can affect the mechanical and electrical characteristics of the circuit.

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Signal integrity (SI) grew out of the electromagnetic compatibility discipline in the early 1990s and gradually became a hot topic in its own right. Although the term SI never appeared in the title, one of the first books on topic was Introduction to Electromagnetic Compatibility by Clayton Paul. About a decade later, power integrity (PI) became the new hot topic, creating a separate discipline on which a multitude of books and conference sessions were based.

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