Embedded Side-Emitting LED Creation

The Bluetooth transmitter design example in the AlTIum Designer 14 installation package shows us a new hardware and software board design tool. Someone asked me to modify this design and use it in another flexible design. However, it is very difficult to change the design because there is no space to place the LED. Finding new ways to place LEDs has brought us challenges. This is also a great opportunity for us to try out some new features.

There is a cool feature in the AD14 that supports embedded components. This can be used in many situations, including saving space in ultra-dense designs and shortening the length of loops in high-speed designs. For the design modification of the Bluetooth transmitter, the use of an embedded side-view LED was chosen. Doing so will maintain the original design features without much modification.

Thin packages such as the 48-213 SMD LEDs are ideally suited for embedding on the inside of the PCB, and their limitations stem from the vertical space available inside the board. Creating this package is fairly straightforward, as long as you take full advantage of the new features and add a little bit of modification.

1. A thin package such as a 48-213 SMD LED is ideally suited for embedding in a PCB board. Its limitations stem from the vertical space available inside the board. Creating this package is fairly straightforward, as long as you take full advantage of the new features and add a little bit of modification.

2. The extended entity is applicable to most areas of the LED except for the lens portion. We can generate extended entities on arbitrary polygons. Curved lenses need to be imported into an external STEP model.

3, ready to embed components or start from the package. We must add the cavity of the component fixing area in the package library. The height of this space must be greater than the height of the component, so that there is enough space to place the component. The height of the LED package is 0.3 mm and the height of the defined cavity is 0.35 mm. Of course, this ultimately depends on the specific layer stack and overall design intent.

4, it should be noted that such a cavity can be placed in any package, regardless of whether the component is embedded in the board. When the component is placed in the inner layer, the cavity will hollow out the board's dielectric, and the components will not have any effect when placed on the outer layer. Place the newly created LED on the inner layer to see how cool the results are!

5. Technically speaking, the cavity will change the stacked stack in a specific area, so it is very important to pass this information to the manufacturer. The automatically generated and placed stacking stack diagram already contains this functionality. In this design, no matter where the cavity is added, no matter what the layers in these areas will be affected, there is no problem.

6, at the same time also consider the welding of components, because the embedded components are placed in the board made before. Therefore, it is a good idea to provide independent layout reports and assembly layouts for embedded components.

I uploaded the package and complete design for reference, but these are not limited to the use of embedded components, but are an interesting way to solve this problem!