News & Updates
The eye diagram is a useful measurement or simulation as part of channel compliance. The measurement shows many different factors that can affect signal behavior simultaneously, ultimately allowing for qualification of errors and losses in a channel. In this article, I’ll run over some of the fundamental measurements that you could manually extract from an eye diagram and how they reveal some strategies for improving channel designs.
This track is for the designer who is new to high-speed layout and routing practices and wants to understand how they relate to signal integrity, and how to get started designing for high-speed digital applications.
To readers who have been working in the PCB industry for most of your career, you have probably seen a very diverse group of professionals with varied skill sets and backgrounds. Designers might get started as engineers or as technicians, and some designers learn how to create beautiful PCB layouts in university. No matter how you got into PCB design, there are some important skills to know that will take you a long way towards advancing your career.
When starting out with PCB design, it’s common to treat the process as simply ‘connecting the dots’: as long as connections are made, it’s not particularly important how these connections are made. Having reviewed quite a number of PCBs of other PCB design engineers over the last few years, there are common, unfortunately erroneous, occurrences between a lot of them. This article aims to illustrate the top five beginner PCB design mistakes and what we can do to avoid making them. Let’s get started!
As the PCB design community embraces the benefits of this new printed circuit board fabrication technique, there are of course many questions to be answered. Today’s blog will address some of the most commonly asked questions related to circuit layer stack up as people are introduced to this new technology.
SPICE simulation saves you critical time in the prototyping phase. Understanding your simulation interface makes it simple to analyze how your circuits work in different scenarios. Altium Designer provides an intuitive, dedicated interface to support your simulation verification, setup, and analysis directly in your schematic environment. You also benefit from growing support for popular model formats, as well as generic models, simplifying circuit definition and simulation.
We are happy to announce that the Altium Designer 22.9 update is now available. Altium Designer 22.9 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!
The highest performing operational amplifiers often need a split supply with positive and negative voltages connected to the op amps supply rails. In this project, we’re going to be building a positive/negative dual rail power supply for a differential oscilloscope probe I’m designing. I’m making the power supply a separate project, as a dual rail supply is quite useful to have, and I’m sure I’ll find multiple uses for it in the future.
Importing file-based libraries from your local computer or network drive to your Altium 365 workspace can be done using the Library Importer. Altium’s Library Migrator was renamed Library Importer—the feature’s name was changed to conform more closely to the tool’s purpose. Not only is its name new, but our team has also made several user experience improvements. We have updated the documentation to reflect this change.
The PCB materials industry has spent significant amounts of time developing materials that provide lowest possible signal loss for products with RF applications. For high speed and high frequency designs, losses will limit signal propagation distance and distort signals, and it will create an impedance deviation that can be seen in TDR measurements. In this article, we'll look at the balance between copper foil losses and other types of losses in a PCB, as well as some strategies that are commonly used to overcome roughness.
We are happy to announce that the Altium Designer 22.8 update is now available. Altium Designer 22.8 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!
In this article, we’ll look at beamforming implementation in an advanced method combining analog and digital techniques, known as hybrid beamforming. This method blends both digital and analog techniques to create multiple beams and thus reach multiple users with varying intensities. In the case of an RF imaging system or a radar system, hybrid beamforming in a MIMO technique also allows tracking of multiple targets with adjustable resolution.
Differential data transmission lines usage can be challenging for even experienced designers. First you need to be familiar with the concepts of differential data transmission, find out why it is used, and what the potential advantage for your signal. This webinar will help you determine what part of your designs need differential pairs implementations and how to create such pairs with a given wave impedance in Altium Designer.
The problem with every via impedance calculator that I have seen is simple: they are incomplete or totally wrong. The “incomplete” part refers to a lack of context; these calculators can roughly reproduce a well-known estimate from a legend like Howard Johnson in his Digital Design textbooks. However, these calculators never provide insight into what they are actually calculating, or where the calculated via impedance is accurate. Keep reading to see why these calculators get it so wrong, as well as the context surrounding via impedance.
Going deeper into crosstalk, there is always the issue of verifying EMI/EMC compliance through test and measurement. With the multitude of signal integrity problems that can arise in real PCBs, how can the astute designer distinguish them all? Some problems are clearer than others, with specific signal integrity measurements being developed for testing and measuring particular aspects of signal behavior. The fact is, multiple signal integrity problems could be present on a single interconnect simultaneously.
Once you’ve finished your new project and you’re ready to push it to your manufacturer, you’ll normally be stuck in an endless email chain with an engineer, or you’ll have to share cloud links with each other. The cloud sharing and design release tools in Altium Designer and Altium Concord Pro are a huge help in this area. In this post, I’m going to take an existing project I’ve worked with in a number of recent blogs, create some fabrication and assembly documentation, and finally push this data to a manufacturer using Altium Concord Pro.
To this day, I still see many PCB layout “rules of thumb” that first became common nearly 20 years ago. Do these rules still universally apply? The answer is a firm “maybe.” The discussion around PCB layout rules of thumb is not that these rules are correct or incorrect. The problem is that the discussion around these rules often lacks context, leading to the always/never type of discussion seen in some popular forums. My goal in this article is to communicate the context behind the common PCB design rules.
As the operating speed of components has increased, controlled impedance is becoming more common in digital, analog, and mixed-signal systems. If the controlled impedance value for an interconnect is incorrect, it can be very difficult to identify this problem during an in-circuit test. However, testing is normally performed on a PCB test coupon, which is manufactured on the same panel as the PCB. If you want to get through board spins quickly and aid future designs, you might consider designing a test coupon and keeping it handy for future designs.
Altium’s DbLib support is one of the oldest and most loved features of Altium Designer for managing electronic components and their data. They’ve been present in the software world since before I could fathom the existence of Ohm’s law. Altium 20.1’s new Component Sync feature allows you to synchronize virtually any database or database Library with Altium 365, taking advantage of both approaches strengths.
If you’ve created your next great schematic, there is a lot going on behind the scenes in your design software. A schematic netlist is one of the central pieces of information that will be used in multiple features in your design software to create a real PCB. Your schematic netlist provides both electrical connectivity information, and reflects the functional structure of your design data in a single set of data.
An SMPS is one of those quiet (yet electrically noisy) devices that makes your favorite electronics run smoothly. Among the numerous DC-DC converter topologies, a buck converter finds plenty of uses for stepping down the input voltage to a lower level while providing high efficiency power conversion. A common question around component selection for these power converters is how to select an inductor for a buck converter. The goal in working with an inductor and other components in a buck converter is to limit power loss to heat and while minimizing current ripple.
GPS-capable devices range from your phone to your smartwatch; simply type in your destination and follow the directions. Simple, right? According to the Washington Post, we should all stop using GPS as it’s ruining the navigation centers of our brains. Despite the neurological effects on perception and judgment, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) aims to find alternatives to GPS to provide redundancy.
The list of features available in Bluetooth just got a little longer since the release of Bluetooth 5.1. If you want to incorporate a Bluetooth 5.1 SoC into your new product, you have two primary options for bringing this component into your board. The first is as an SoC that mounts to your board just like any other component. The other option is to bring a module into your new board—directly onto the surface layer. Here’s what you need to know about a Bluetooth 5.1 SoC or module in your next IoT product.
Get Started with Altium 365 with a step-by-step guide and videos to experience the most connected experience for PCB design and realization: https://my.altium.com/altium-365/getting-started/
Since its introduction in the late 90s, the USB standard has never ceased to grow in popularity. There has been a growing trend toward USB being a power delivery interface with data, rather than a data interface that can supply power, as the 1.0 specification originally intended. To supply the increasing thirst for power over USB, the USB 3.0 Spec with Type-C began implementing the Power Delivery standard, which you should consider using for your next electronics project.
There are many types of circuit board tests available in electronics manufacturing today, each having unique goals and characteristics. This article presents guidelines at the design level (schematic and layout) to enable the use of in-circuit testing (ICT) fixtures to verify proper component assembly. These simple test fixtures allow your board to be tested as its assembled, which helps identify and remove failed boards from your production run.
Technological advancements have been a hallmark of the past few decades, from the widespread adoption of internet technology to the smartphones and wireless devices we rely on every day to stay connected. Orlan Thatcher, Board Layout Specialist at Cirris Systems, could never have predicted the demand their services would generate. The company struggled with six different software platforms before switching to Altium Designer.
I used to work in a research lab that worked primarily with RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) and NFC (Near Field Communication) technology, particularly for the agriculture industry and cattle identification. These were very specialized fields; however, the lab also worked on projects which involved retail and various other applications for NFC. It’s an amazing technology that you might be using every day without thinking about it - building access to your mobile phone payments, for instance.
You need to define your PCB geometry in the context of your enclosure. If your board cannot physically be assembled into the final product, it doesn't matter how well laid out it is electrically. This webinar focuses on how the MCAD CoDesigner allows you to edit your PCB in the context of a higher-level assembly, allowing you to respect the relevant mechanical constraints.
In Part 1 of this article, I described the first steps that occur during the PCB fabrication process. They detailed the inner layer processing effort as well as the efforts that take place during the transition from inner layer processing to lamination. This part of the article will provide a detailed description of the lamination, drilling and plating processes.