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Design Reuse
On-Demand Webinar
Rapidly Creating New Designs And Reusing Existing Ones

It's no secret that software developers often use completed code fragments from other projects for quick and predictable results. The same can be done for PCB Design, there is no need to spend time rewiring schematics or laying out components on boards you’ve done before. Join us this webinar where we’ll go over how you can use your existing designs to create reusable design blocks, speeding up the design cycle for your future projects.

Length Tuning Impedance
Blog
What is the Impedance of Length-Tuning Structures?

Do length-tuning structures create an impedance discontinuity? The answer is an unequivocal “yes”, but it might not matter in your design depending on several factors. Applying a length-tuning structure is equivalent to changing the distance between the traces while meandering. Therefore, you will have a change in the odd-mode impedance of a single trace. The question then becomes: does this deviation in trace impedance in a length tuning structure matter?

Embedded thumbnail for Creating a Schematic Symbol - Placing Designators and Comments
How to create a Schematic Symbol
Creating a Schematic Symbol - Placing Designators and Comments

Placing your designator or comments can be done automatically, but that doesn’t mean they’re visible. We’ll walk you through how to make them visible and position them correctly no matter what orientation your symbol is with automatic positioning.

Embedded thumbnail for Creating a Schematic Symbol: Adding Additional Parts
How to create a Schematic Symbol
Creating a Schematic Symbol: Adding Additional Parts

Altium Designer makes it easy to add additional parts to your schematic library. We’ll show you how through copying and configuring your new components through the Pin Editor and the properties panel.

Designing the Next-Generation Electronics
Blog
A-SAP™ – What do you need to know?

The continued miniaturization of both packaging and component size in next-generation electronics is becoming harder and harder to work around and presents a significant challenge for both PCB designers and PCB fabricators. To effectively navigate the constraints of the traditional subtractive-etch PCB fabrication processes, PCB designs require advanced PCB fabrication capabilities while pushing the limits of finer feature size, higher layer counts, multiple levels of stacked micro vias and increased lamination cycles.

Embedded thumbnail for Component Placement Control Using Rooms
How to work with Rooms
Component Placement Control Using Rooms

Rooms give you more control over how and where your components are placed in your PCB. We’ll show you how to use room properties to limit what is allowed in and out of a room using the room definition and custom queries.

Pin-package and Via Delay Values
Blog
Pin-Package Delay and Via Delay in High Speed Length Tuning

Take a look at the inside of some integrated circuit packages, and you’ll find a number of wires bonded to the semiconductor die and the pads at the edge of the component's package. As a signal traverses makes its way along an interconnect and into a destination circuit, signals need to travel across these bond wires and pads before they are interpreted as a logic state. As you look around the edge of an IC, these bond wires can have different lengths, and they incur different levels of delay and contribute to total jitter.

Embedded thumbnail for How to work with Differential Pair Classes?
How to Work with Differential Pairs
How to work with Differential Pair Classes?

Modern boards can contain a large number of differential pairs. For convenience, they are combined into differential pairs classes. In this video, we'll walk you through how to create and apply a differential pair class. 

Embedded thumbnail for Adding Rooms from the Schematic
How to work with Rooms
Adding Rooms from the Schematic

Rooms can be added directly from the schematic sheet. From the schematic sheet they are pushed to the PCB. Here we'll look at the rooms and component classes generated by default in the schematic, how to add and configure rooms manually, and how to push them to the PCB.

6-Layer PCB Design
Blog
6-Layer PCB Design Guidelines

Once you’ve run out of room on your 4-layer PCB, it’s time to graduate to a 6-layer board. The additional layer can give you room for more signals, an additional plane pair, or a mix of conductors. How you use these extra layers is less important than how you arrange them in the PCB stackup, as well as how you route on a 6-layer PCB. If you’ve never used a 6-layer board before, or you’ve had EMI troubles with this stackup that are difficult to solve, keep reading to see some 6-layer PCB design guidelines and best practices.

Component Management
On-Demand Webinar
Help Ensure The Best Designs With Component Management

There are many aspects to designing a PCB. One of the larger aspects has to do with managing your components. We all need components for our designs, but are those components in our library and designs up-to-date or even purchasable? These questions need to be answered before we can safely use them. If not, we could just be wasting our time designing with invalid components. Altium Designer® has several tools to help you manage the components in your libraries and designs.

Altium Designer Interface
Blog
Altium Designer 22.5 Update

We are happy to announce that the Altium Designer 22.5 update is now available. Altium Designer 22.5 continues to focus on improving the user experience, as well as performance and stability of the software, based on feedback from our users. Check out the key new features in the What's New section on the left side of this window!

Are Hybrid PCB Stackups Reliable?
Blog
How Reliable is Your Hybrid PCB Stackup?

PCB stackups often incorporate slightly dissimilar materials that could pose a reliability problem. Hybrid PCBs are one case where the PCB stackup will include different materials, typically a standard FR4 laminate and a PTFE laminate for RF PCBs. Designers who want to take the lead on material selection when designing their hybrid stackups should consider these factors that affect reliability. As with any PCB stackup, make sure you get your fabricator involved in the manufacturing process early to ensure reliability problems do not arise during production.

Embedded thumbnail for How to Draw a Board Outline Using Coordinates
How-To's
How to Draw a Board Outline Using Coordinates

In this video, we cover how to draw a curve by using coordinates. This can be very helpful when creating a board outline.

Embedded thumbnail for Creating a Schematic Symbol: Mapping out the Component
How to create a Schematic Symbol
Creating a Schematic Symbol: Mapping out the Component

When creating a schematic symbol, one of your first tasks will be creating a component symbol. We’ll show you how to map out a component in the Schematic Library Editor by creating and configuring the component, adding pins, and creating graphics.

Monte Carlo vs Sensitivity Analysis
Blog
Monte Carlo Simulation vs. Sensitivity Analysis: What’s the Difference?

In a previous article about circuit simulation and reliability, I looked at how Monte Carlo analysis is commonly used to evaluate circuits that are subject to random variations in component values. Sensitivity analysis is a bit different and it tells you how the operating characteristics of your circuit change in a specific direction. Compared to a Monte Carlo simulation, sensitivity analysis gives you a convenient way to predict exactly how the operating characteristics will change if you were to deliberately increase or decrease the value of a component.

Embedded thumbnail for How and When to Use Rooms
How to work with Rooms
How and When to Use Rooms

Rooms are an extremely valuable tool within the Altium Designer PCB environment, but how and when do you use rooms? If you need to control component placement and layout, assign a specific design rule to a group of items, or if you have repeated channels that need similar layouts in your multichannel design, rooms can make it much easier.

Simulation, Build and Test
Blog
Creating Continuous Integration Pipelines for FPGAs

Field Programmable Gate Arrays, or FPGAs, have become ubiquitous amongst high-speed, real-time digital systems. The speed at which FPGAs operate continues to increase at a dizzying pace but their adoption into Continuous Integration pipelines seems not to trail as closely. In this article we will review the concept of CI pipelines, their application to FPGAs, and look at examples on how to set this up.

Embedded thumbnail for MCAD CoDesigner Quick Start: Autodesk Fusion 360
Working with MCAD CoDesigner extension
MCAD CoDesigner Quick Start: Autodesk Fusion 360

MCAD CoDesigner is built to address the challenges of electronic product design by enabling seamless collaboration between your electrical and mechanical engineers. This video will show you how to start collaborate between Altium Designer and Autodesk Fusion 360. 

Embedded thumbnail for Component Placement Control for DFM
DFM and Fabrication Cost/Time Constraints
Component Placement Control for DFM

Component placement is a crucial part of making sure your design is manufacturable, so you need to be able to control placement. We’ll show you how, through rules and courtyard layers to maintain accessibility and manufacturability in your entire design through component placement control.

Tag
Optoelectronics
Blog
The Digital Engineer's Guide to RF PCB Layout and Routing

With modern systems running at higher frequencies, incorporating multiple wireless protocols, and interfacing with many analog sensors, advanced designs require knowledge from digital and RF design disciplines. If you’re now starting to work in the RF realm and you need to design an all-analog or mixed-signal system, RF PCB layout will need to become a new specialty. If you’re a digital designer and you’re now jumping into high-frequency analog design, keep reading to learn more about RF PCB layout and routing.

Tracks on a finished PCB
Blog
Microstrip Ground Clearance: How Close is Too Close?

If you take a look at any guidelines for controlled impedance traces, you’ll clearly see that the trace width is calculated without any ground pour near the trace. However, most designers will state that unused areas on each PCB layer should be filled in with grounded copper pour. If you bring some ground pour near a microstrip, you’ve now formed a coplanar waveguide arrangement. So now the question becomes, how much microstrip to ground clearance do you need to ensure you’ve hit your impedance goals?

Blog
PCB Layout Guidelines for Switching Power Supplies and Regulators

In this article, I want to briefly focus on how power supplies and regulators are different, although this should already be clear to most designers. For a power supply and for a PCB with an on-board regulator, the switching regulator layout will be a major determinant of overall system performance. Therefore, we’ll largely look at some layout guidelines for switching power supplies in terms of regulator layout.

PCB Sharing - What Data You Can Share in Altium 365
Blog
PCB Sharing and What Data You Can Share in Altium 365

Altium 365 is giving design teams a new way to share and manage their design data. Most users are probably aware of project-level and component-level PCB sharing features, but sharing actually extends down to the level of individual files thanks to the managed content system within Altium 365. If you’ve ever wanted a single place to store and manage all of your design data, then Altium 365 is here to help you and your team stay organized.

Power Supply Components on PCB
Blog
How to Combat Power Supply EMI in Your PCB

Power supplies are one of those systems we all tend to take for granted. Everyone’s first task in power supply design is usually to ensure the voltage and current output reach the desired level, probably followed by thermal considerations. However, due to safety issues, EMC requirements, the use of higher PWM frequencies, and the need for smaller packaging, power supply EMI should be a major design consideration. With that being said, what are the major sources of power supply EMI, and how can power supply designers keep them in check?

Free footprint library resources
Blog
Leveraging the Free Footprint Community to Design at Lightning Speed

Designing footprints is a job most people hate. It’s tedious, time-consuming, and doesn’t result in much except, well, a footprint. Companies now realize this pain point and offering designers free, well-designed PCB footprints. Why would they spend their time doing this? In this article, we’re going to review some of the free offerings that exist within the PCB design community. Once you’re armed with this information, you will spend most of your time designing and routing boards instead of pulling your hair out creating footprints all day.

PCB Motherboard with Multiple Slots with RAM Memory Installed, and Other System Hardware
Blog
Designing for Multiple PCBs in the Same Project

The majority of our PCB designs sit as a single PCB under our Altium Designer projects. It sometimes happens that we have a single project that requires multiple PCBs with various stuffing options, but when it happens, a lot of us tend to get stuck. How do you handle the exact change across both projects? How do you guarantee those changes to be identical? This article will review an approach to managing multiple PCB designs within a single project, ensuring your single source of truth.

EMI and thermal challenges in 5G design
Blog
Designing 5G Devices

The next stage in the evolution of mobile telephony is here with the roll-out of 5G. The designer looking to incorporate functionality to handle 5G signals into their circuits will face some challenging issues. So, what’s so special about 5G?

PCB tracks
Blog
All About Your PCB Trace Length: How Long is Too Long?

The maximum PCB trace length you can place between two components depends on multiple factors, such as signaling protocol, component specification, losses in PCB laminate, and skew. With all this in mind, let’s look at where losses accumulate along the channel.

LDO
Blog
Using an LDO vs. Switching Regulator in Your PCB

For low power devices, we generally see two types of power regulators: a low dropout regulator (LDO) or a switching regulator. You can mix and match these at different points along your power bus, but there’s still the matter of choosing whether to use an LDO vs. a switching regulator in your designs. If you’ve ever wondered how these decisions are made and when to use each type of regulator, just know that there is more to this decision than simply looking at the input/output voltage/current.

Natural flux
Blog
What They Don’t Teach You About Fluxes

PCB fabrication is an extremely complex technological topic that deserves recognition as the most fundamental part of PCB engineering. Unless connectors, conductive adhesive, wire-bonding, or zebra-tape are used, in the modern electronics industry it’s always necessary to use some kind of flux during the soldering process to create an electric connection. In this article, we’ll discuss fluxes — what they are, what they are made of (yes, there is going to be a lot of chemistry, don’t be scared), how they should be used, and in what direction the industry is going.

PCB with ice for best cooling
Blog
Thermal Management for Integrated Circuits

As anyone who designs and builds electronic devices knows, the device will generate heat when it’s switched on. Wherever current flows through an impedance, energy losses will manifest themselves as heat. Integrated circuit packaging is getting smaller to meet the trend for more compact devices but at the cost of poorer thermal properties. This article describes the basic thermal management approaches to consider in your next designs. 

Blog
Anatomy of Latitude Part Two: "Thread with a Needle” in the context of energy

We continue to explore the magic of energy conversion in a PWM transducer. Why is it magic? Theoretically, in a PWM transducer this happens without losses, isn't that magic? A PWM transducer, like a tailor with scissors, cuts the “fabric of energy” into pieces, and then, like a sewing machine, stitches the pieces of energy into a dress - DC Magnitude. What is a constant component and how can we get it? Let's explore!

Pulse Width Regulation Module
Blog
Anatomy of Latitude Part One: Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) as a Result of the Evolution of Linear Systems

There are different techniques in the world of technology to achieve various goals, both final and intermediate. Some techniques are so successful that they are commonly used with high efficiency. Electronics is no exception. The greatest example is the use of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signals (energy), which is applied in any modern electronic device. To apply PWM effectively, it is necessary to understand the engineering difficulties that engineers faced in the past, and the thoughts and ideas that subsequently were combined into effective, complete PWM power solutions.

Electrolytic capacitor
Blog
What Influences Electrolytic Capacitor Lifespan?

If you speak with a bunch of design engineers, you might quickly form the opinion that the electrolytic capacitor has a particularly dubious reputation. A faulty electrolyte mix used in these types of capacitors led to premature device failures, and quite often, a “bit of a mess” was made to the PCBs on which they were soldered. However, despite the problem of the capacitor plague, this article is focusing on helping the designer understand how to get many more years of useful life from an electrolytic capacitor.

Elegant writing
Blog
Creating Elegant and Readable Schematics

A schematic drawing will not only tell your PCB design software what needs to connect where, but it also communicates the purpose of a circuit to other people. It’s easy to create a schematic, but it can be harder to make a helpful schematic that can be quickly and easily read and comprehended by the reader. In this guide, based on years of industry experience, we will show you how to improve your schematic layout so that your designs are elegant and readable.

Tag
Embedded thumbnail for Defining the Layer Stackup
Defining the Layer Stackup

The PCB is designed and formed as a stack of layers and the definition of the PCB layer stack is a critical element of successful printed circuit board design. In Altium Designer, the Layer Stack Manager is used to develop the printed circuit board internal design including layer-pairing, careful via design, any back drilling requirements, rigid/flex requirements, copper balancing, layer stack symmetry, and material compliance. This video guides you through creation of a layer stackup, adding the necessary layers, as well as adding an impedance profile.

Embedded thumbnail for Searching for Errors in Schematic
Searching for Errors in Schematic

Searching for Errors: Errors and mistakes happen to everyone - from beginners to professionals. So we always preach how it is paramount for your design to be validated before pushing it to the PCB. But luckily it’s pretty easy to find and analyze any errors using Altium Designer. We’ll take a look at how to find and analyze errors in your schematic.

Embedded thumbnail for Creating Net Classes
Jun 2, 2020
Creating Net Classes

A Net Class is a collection of nets that can be used for creating a targeted design rule. So for example, you may want all power and ground nets to have a minimum track width to handle a specific current rating. So we’ll show you how to assign these nets to a NetClass. 

Embedded thumbnail for How to Transfer Libraries to Concord Pro
New in Altium Designer 20 May 6, 2020
How to Transfer Libraries to Concord Pro

This video demonstrates how the Library Migrator can quickly move database and integrated libraries to the Concord Pro workspace. Your design can be organized and verified in the Library Migrator before pushing it to the cloud. After migration, the Messages panel will display any missing information.

Embedded thumbnail for Improved Impedance Calculator
New in Altium Designer 20 Apr 29, 2020
Improved Impedance Calculator

The impedance calculator in the Layer Stack Manager now supports single and differential coplanar structures. This video shows how the impedance calculator has been improved with new coplanar transmission line structures, greater control over the dimensional properties of the physical structure, and modeling of Conductor Surface Roughness using Surface Roughness and Roughness Factor values. 

Embedded thumbnail for Propagation Delay Support
New in Altium Designer 20 Apr 27, 2020
Propagation Delay Support

In Altium Designer 20.0, you can now selectively monitor propagation delay along the whole connection or selected objects, such as tracks, pads, and vias.

Embedded thumbnail for New Routing Capabilities
New in Altium Designer 20 Apr 23, 2020
New Routing Capabilities

Advanced routing capabilities help you complete the most basic, as well as the most difficult, routing challenges. In Altium Designer 20.0, we’ve added intelligent control over pad entries that are capable of working with any combination of pad geometry as well as a new any angle routing mode that allows you to make beautiful traces that smoothly contours around obstacles.

Embedded thumbnail for New Length Tuning Engine
New in Altium Designer 20 Apr 21, 2020
New Length Tuning Engine

The tuning engine in Altium Designer has been redesigned and is now better than ever. Tuning sections can be picked up and moved to new locations on the track. What is truly remarkable is that the tunings are completely dynamic and change shape and fill patterns depending on the boundaries and surroundings.

Embedded thumbnail for How to Assign Names to Polygons
Working with Polygons Apr 3, 2020
How to Assign Names to Polygons

For some polygons, it is not always reasonable to use an automatically generated name so a custom name is needed. With a proper polygon name, you can quickly find the desired polygon in a list and correctly set the pour priority in relation to other polygons. By using unique names, you can create design rules that apply only to specified polygons.

Embedded thumbnail for How to Use View Mode in Altium Designer Without a License
How-To's Mar 16, 2020
How to Use View Mode in Altium Designer Without a License

In Altium Designer 20.0, you can use Altium Designer in Viewer mode when signed into your AltiumLive account and no active license is being used. The Altium Designer Viewer license can be used by anyone with an AltiumLive account and no other licenses or subscription is needed. The license can be activated from the License Management page. 

Embedded thumbnail for Any Angle Routing
New in Altium Designer 20 Feb 26, 2020
Any Angle Routing

With any angle routing in Altium Designer, you're able to expertly maneuver around obstacles on a densely populated board, routing deep into your BGA, eliminating the need for extra signal layers. With an intelligent obstacle avoidance algorithm, you're able to avoid obstancles using tangential arcs, making the most efficient use of your board real estate.

Embedded thumbnail for Schematic Dynamic Data Model
New in Altium Designer 20 Feb 26, 2020
Schematic Dynamic Data Model

Recompiling large schematics can take up a lot of time. This is why Altium Designer uses a new dynamic data model, which incrementally and continuously compiles in the background eliminating the need to perform a full design compile.

Embedded thumbnail for Time Based Matched Lengths
New in Altium Designer 20 Feb 26, 2020
Time Based Matched Lengths

High-speed digital circuits depend on signals and data arriving on time. If traces are improperly tuned, flight times vary and data errors can be abundant. Altium Designer 20 introduces the calculation of the propagation time on traces and provides synchronized flight time for high-speed digital signals.

Embedded thumbnail for Schematic Rendering
New in Altium Designer 20 Feb 25, 2020
Schematic Rendering

A smooth and fast schematic experience awaits thanks to DirectX in Altium Designer. This new implementation smoothes out zooming and panning, and also dramatically speeds up copy and paste functionality.

Embedded thumbnail for Properties Panel for Schematics
New in Altium Designer 20 Feb 24, 2020
Properties Panel for Schematics

In Altium Designer version 20.0, the Interactive Properties panel for schematics includes several functional improvements as well as productivity enhancements. The entire layout has been refined to optimize efficiency, icons and graphical previews have been improved, and there is now a smart parameters filter both for schematic lists and components. Dialogs for schematic properties, so beloved by our seasoned users, have returned stronger and better than ever.

Embedded thumbnail for Return Path Design Rule
New in Altium Designer 20 Feb 24, 2020
Return Path Design Rule

High-speed signals create electromagnetic fields that can cause cross-talk or data errors unless proper return paths are provided. Proper return paths allow noise currents to return to ground through a very low impedance, eliminating any problems. The new Return Path design rule monitors return paths and checks for a continuous signal return path on the designated reference layer above or below the signals targeted by the rule.

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