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Schematic Compare
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Schematic Compare

A design project doesn’t appear out of nowhere. The design process spreads over time, and project documents change. Schematic documents gradually become more complex, new functional blocks appear, and already finished parts can be modified and updated.

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How-To's
How to Open All Schematic Documents

This video shows how to open all your project's schematic documents at once.

Embedded Capacitance Materials Overview
Blog
Embedded Capacitance Materials Overview

Capacitance is your friend whenever you need stable power integrity, which is why there is so much focus on decoupling capacitors. While these components are important and they can be used to provide targeted power integrity solutions to certain components, there is one specialty material used to supercharge capacitance in your PCB stackup or package substrate. 

How To Import Libraries and Manage Components With Altium 365
Blog
How To Import Libraries and Manage Components With Altium 365

The problems you can experience with components and libraries are endless. These problems are the most significant source of design issues and the biggest reason behind respins, costing companies untold amounts of lost profit annually.
If you want to have a better understanding of how to use Altium 365 to maintain a strong and centralized library that is free of problems and headaches, you may want to consider attending this lecture.

Embedded thumbnail for Calculating Impedance in Altium Designer
Impedance calculation
Calculating Impedance in Altium Designer

This video covers how to calculate impedance in Altium Designer. This is especially important when dealing with high-speed designs. You want to make sure impedance is matched to avoid any reflections and maintain good signal integrity.

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How to Work with 3D Mode
Using 3D Component Body Features for Precise Component Creation

Learn to quickly and accurately place 3D models of components on their footprints

The High-Speed PCB Stackup Design Challenge
Blog
The High-Speed PCB Stackup Design Challenge

As much as we would like to build every high speed PCB perfectly, with ideal SI/PI/EMI characteristics, it isn’t always possible due to many practical constraints. Sometimes a stackup can be “good enough,” even for a high-speed PCB. This always comes from the need to balance engineering constraints, functional requirements, and the need to ensure signal and power integrity in a high-speed design, and finally to ensure compliance with EMC requirements.

Ensuring First Pass Manufacturing Success
On-Demand Webinar
Ensuring First Pass Manufacturing Success

When it's time to release your project to your manufacturer, it's essential to ensure that all the necessary design aspects like assembly, BOM, and documentation are accurately and completely conveyed. Consistency is key to ensuring a successful release. Without clear release documentation, the designer faces increased risks of costly manufacturing response, time-consuming rework, or unintentional defects that can make it into the final product. 

How I Improved My Collaboration Efficiency with Altium 365
Blog
How I Improved My Collaboration Efficiency with Altium 365

Involving the whole team that will bring a product to completion early on in the development cycle is vital to efficient development. Design reviews with all the relevant parties are critical at each step of the design process, starting with high-level component selection, then through the schematic capture and PCB layout stages. 

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Impedance calculation
How to Define an Impedance Profile for an Assymetric Stripeline

This video shows how to define an impedance profile for an asymmetric stripline.

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How I Improved my Collaboration Efficiency with Altium 365 | Altium 365: Power User Insights

Collaboration with other teams or contractors in the electronics industry is typically a painful and inefficient experience. All too often, communication is left until the last minute when boards are all but ordered. Let's talk about how to collaborate with colleagues with Altium 365 in a different way.

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How to Work with Draftsman
Working with Annotation Tools

Draftsman Documents provide annotation tools to convey physical properties such as tolerances and surface finish

Countersink and Counterbore
Blog
Countersink and Counterbore

Ergonomics and convenience are important issues when designing a printed circuit board and the device as a whole. A lot of Altium Designer tools are aimed at solving them. These include Countersink and Counterbore holes, which allow the use of various types of screws in the mounting holes of the board.

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How to Work with 3D Mode
3D View Control

Learn how to use the 3D display mode of the PCB and learn to control the camera in this mode in this video

Migrating Data From Other Version Control Systems
Blog
Migrating Data From Other Version Control Systems

The development of electronic devices always involves the release of many different types of files. And these files are not static - they change as the project progresses. When filling a project with data, a user creates new files, modifies outdated files that have become irrelevant. Managing project data is a separate task, especially for large developments where several participants with different specializations are involved in the process.

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Impedance calculation
Impedance Calculation Single-Ended Transmission Lines

Transmission lines help preserve signal integrity and reduce EMI in high speed designs. We’ll show you you to define your single ended transmission lines in Altium Designer and automatically calculate impedance on a two layer and multi-layer board.

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How to Work with Draftsman
Working with Dimensions: Draftsman Documents

Draftsman Documents provide dimensioning tools to capture and display the physical features of the product for fabrication and documentation. 

Properties Panel Tuning
Blog
Properties Panel Tuning

High-speed PCBs often require tuning groups of tracks, both single and differential. Altium Designer includes powerful tools that allow you to solve such tasks quickly and with high quality. Study this document and achieve the desired result even faster.

Three Methods for Building MCAD Ready Components
On-Demand Webinar
Three Methods for Building MCAD Ready Components

One of the most difficult and frustrating things to arise when traveling to a foreign country is the language barrier. Communicating a simple greeting can sometimes seem like a big hassle. The same thing is true for different CAD tools. When your tools aren’t speaking the same language, you’re going to run into problems. Bridge this gap by building out your component libraries with everything it takes to truly define a component, including 3D models that seamlessly propagate into the PCB editor and beyond.

Reflectionless Matching vs. Conjugate Matching: An Apparent Contradiction
Blog
Reflectionless Matching vs. Conjugate Matching: An Apparent Contradiction

There is one confusion related to impedance matching that comes up again and again, and it appears to be a fundamental confusion between reflection and power delivery. This leads to an apparent contradiction that arises when we try to generalize power delivery to wave reflection, despite the fact that the two were not meant to be related.

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Low Cost and Professionally Built LED Panel
Blog
Insulated Metal Substrates: Building an LED Panel

In this project we’ll be building a moderate sized LED panel on insulated metal substrate (IMS). This light panel has three different white balance High CRI LED types on it, warm, neutral and cool. By changing the brightness of the different white balances, the light from the panel can be adjusted to match other lighting, making it perfect for film use - but also creating perfect lighting for electronics work. As with all my projects, this LED panel is open source, you can find the Altium project files over on my GitHub released under the permissive MIT License.

DFM For Your Materials
Blog
DFM in PCB Material Selection

Every design should begin with selecting the materials that will appear in the PCB stackup, as well as arranging layers in the stackup to support layout and routing. This section of our PCB manufacturing andc DFM crash course focuses on selecting the right materials for your PCB design. Materials should be selected given the particular design requirements outlined in your specifications.

PCB Layout for an BGA
Blog
How to Start an FPGA PCB Layout For Your Embedded System

FPGAs come in quad or BGA packages that can be difficult to floorplan, especially with the high number of I/Os often implemented in these components. FPGAs offer a lot of advantages in terms of their reconfigurability, but they can require a lot of effort to layout and route without headaches. If you’ve never worked with an FPGA in your PCB layout, we have some guidelines that can help you get started.

2-port VNA on a 3-port Network
Blog
How to Get 3-port S-parameters From a 2-port VNA Measurement

S-parameters are fundamental quantities in signal integrity, and an ability to understand them from measurement or analysis is very important. If you have a 3-port network, like a power divider or circulator, it may appear that you must use a 3-port VNA to measure these S-parameters. It is always acceptable to measure between two ports, but you need to know what exactly it is you are measuring. In this article, we’ll look at the relationship between the true 3-port S-parameters with a 2-port measurement.

Fab and Assembly Crash Course
Blog
A Day in the Life of the PCB Manufacturing Process

Before implementing design for manufacturing, it is important to understand the underlying process behind producing a physical PCB. Regardless of the various technologies present in each facility, a large majority of industry-leading manufacturers follow a specific set of steps to turn your design from a drawing in a CAD application into a physical board. In this article, we'll cover the basics that designers need to know as part of our crash course series on PCB manufacturing.

What Are the Main Skew Sources in a PCB?
Blog
Addressing Skew Sources in High Speed PCBs

If you compile a list of skew sources, you'll see that fiber weave-induced skew is only one entry on a long list of skew sources. We'll look at this list of possible skew sources below, and we'll see how they affect the operation of your PCB. From the list below, we'll see that some of these issues with skew are not simply solved by paying attention to the fiber weave construction in a PCB substrate.

Ground Below SMPS Inductors
Blog
Should Ground Be Placed Below Inductors in Switching Regulators?

We love answering questions from our readers and YouTube viewers, and one of the recent questions we received relates to EMI from switching elements in a switching regulator is "Should a cutout be placed below the inductor in a switching regulator circuit?". Despite the variations in inductors and their magnetic behavior, there are some general principles that can be used to judge the effects of placing ground near inductors in switching regulator circuits. We’ll look at some of these principles in this article

Alternative Pins
Blog
Altium Designer 22.6 Update

We are happy to announce that the Altium Designer 22.6 update is now available. Altium Designer 22.6 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!

Top 5 Questions Regarding Stack Up
Blog
SAP (Semi-Additive PCB Process) – Top 5 Questions Regarding Stack Up

This Semi-Additive Process is an additional tool in the PCB fabricators' toolbox that enables them to provide feature sizes for trace width and spacing that are 25 microns, (1 mil) and below depending on the fabricators' imaging equipment. This provides much more flexibility to breakout out tight BGA areas and the ability to shrink overall circuit size and/ or reduce the number of circuit layers in the design. 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.

Three ways to manage your BOM costs
Blog
Improving Supply Chain Success with BOM Management

It’s no secret that component shortages have become more frequent this year. In fact, countries around the world are losing billions in revenue due to supply issues. Having the right components on hand is more crucial than ever as availability, obsolescence, counterfeit products and environmental non-compliance risks continue to grow. Fortunately, many shortages can be avoided by introducing proactive supply chain practices.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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Embedded thumbnail for Specifying NSMD and SMD for BGA
How to Design a BGA
Specifying NSMD and SMD for BGA

BGA layouts use two types of pads: SMD, Solder Mask Pads, or NSMD, Non-Solder Mask Pads. Here we’ll walk you through the differences and how to specify and edit them for your layout.

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Via Stitching
Via Shielding and Stitching

Altium Designer gives you full control over your via shielding and stitching. We’ll show you how to use our shielding and stitching tools, how to alter their parameters, and how to remove any unwanted via shielding and stitching.

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How To Work with High-Speed Projects
xSignals for DDR3 and DDR4

In a high-speed design, DDR3 and DDR4 memory chips can utilize xSignal classes to match track lengths from the controller to the memory chip easily and quickly using the xSignals wizard.

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How To Work with High-Speed Projects
High-Speed Tuning

If you use high-speed interfaces like USB 3.0, PCIE, or DDR3/DDR4, you need to use match length tuning to ensure that they work properly. We’ll show you why and how, as well as demonstrating the different tools for length tuning.

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How to Work with Draftsman
Using Document Parameters with Draftsman

The Draftsman Editor in Altium Designer uses document parameters to allow fine grain control over the draftsman document. We’ll show you how you can use the document parameters in your Draftsman document. 

Embedded thumbnail for High-Speed Features of Creating a Stack
How To Work with High-Speed Projects
High-Speed Features of Creating a Stack

The foundation of any high speed design is the layer stack. We’ll show you some of Altium Designer’s powerful layer stack creation features.

Embedded thumbnail for High-Speed Return Paths
How To Work with High-Speed Projects
High-Speed Return Paths

For high speed designs it is critical to maintain your return path for adequate signal integrity. We’ll show you how, using best practices and error resolutions in Altium Designer.

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How to Work with Draftsman
Working with Design Variants

Altium Designer’s Draftsman Document allows for several different board views and variants that you can work with. We’ll show you how to add new variants and work with their properties to display exactly what you need in your Draftsman Document

Embedded thumbnail for Creating Schematics in High-speed Projects
How To Work with High-Speed Projects
Creating Schematics in High-speed Projects

There are several powerful features in Altium Designer for creating schematics in high speed projects. We’ll show you a few, such as how to utilize nets, net classes, blankets, design rules, and differential pairs.

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How to Work with Multichannel Schematic
Creating Connectivity

Multichannel connectivity can be created in a few different ways. We’ll show you how to create connectivity using ports and net labels efficiently and effectively. 

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How To Work with High-Speed Projects
Hierarchical Structure for High-Speed Projects

A Hierarchical structure can make your high speed project much easier to navigate and complete. We’ll show you some tips and tricks for creating and maintaining a high speed. Hierarchical design project.

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How to work with Snippets
Schematic Design Reuse Using Snippets

Snippets allow you to easily reuse circuitry across multiple parts of your designs. We’ll show you how create a new snippets the Schematic and how to connect and annotate it so you can easily bring your circuitry directly into your board.

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How to work with Snippets
PCB Design Reuse Using Snippets

Snippets give you easy access to reuse circuitry on your PCB. Let’s take a look at how you can create and configure snippets for the PCB, connect a component link with the schematic and update the PCB to include your snippet.

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How to Work with Multichannel Schematic
Creating Schematic Channels

Altium Designer makes creating single and multichannel designs effective and quick. We’ll show you how to create and annotate output and input channels in your design. 

Embedded thumbnail for Using Snapping for Primitives and Components | Draftsman Documents
How to Work with Draftsman
Using Snapping for Primitives and Components | Draftsman Documents

Snapping using the grids and snapping tools in Altium Designer’s Draftsman Editor gives you a lot of control over how you create and annotate primitives and components. We’ll show you how easy it is to use snapping in the Draftsman Editor. 

Embedded thumbnail for Pin Package Delay | High-speed Design
How To Work with High-Speed Projects
Pin Package Delay | High-speed Design

There are a few things to consider when adding and tuning signal delay to your design. Altium Designer gives you the tools to address the fine tuning for signal delay so you can easily make it work, using pin package delay. 

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