News & Updates
Blog
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
On-Demand Webinar
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Group Editing Tools and Methods in Altium Designer Webinar
Do you ever have to edit a large group of objects on your design? Whether you are dealing with your schematic or PCB, this webinar will help you get acquainted with the main tools for group editing of objects in Altium Designer. You will also learn how to effectively apply group editing methods with filters and selection tools in different design scopes.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
On-Demand Webinar
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Using Version Control in Your PCB Project Webinar
Version control has been a staple of software development for decades, but hardware development can benefit just as much from a version control system (VCS). Traditionally, VCS has been managed locally tying you down to a workplace, but advances in cloud technology have removed that limitation. Learn how Altium 365 cloud technology enables working concurrently on designs with built-in version control and evaluate its advantages.
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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.
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Must Have Rapid Prototyping Tools
Suppose your job involves rapidly iterating designs or creating a wide variety of products for clients. In that case, there are some essential tools available that can save you a tremendous amount of time, bringing high engineering risk devices to completion successfully. Whether you’re working on internal projects or developing high mix devices for clients as a consulting or freelance firm, these indispensable tools will help you ship a higher quality product in less time.
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Best Practices for Sharing PCB Files vs. Sharing PCB Projects
Even though today’s cloud platforms are immaculately secure and they allow a range of files to be easily shared, there are times where you should limit the data you’re sharing to only the critical files required. For PCB designers, this means either sharing entire design projects or sharing individual files with your manufacturer, customers, contractors, or collaborators. If you want to eliminate liabilities and keep your team’s design data secure, consider these best practices for sharing PCB design data with Altium 365.
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Best Practices for Using Reference Designs
Best component companies will release reference designs for their new and legacy products to show designers an example application for a component. If the reference design is good enough and it very nicely illustrates how to quickly engineer around a few main components, I’m likely to use them in the design and the component maker has just earned my business. If you’re a newer designer and you’re wondering whether reference designs are right for your next project, follow these best practices so that you don’t make any mistakes with your reference design.
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Altium DbLibs and Electronic Components in the Cloud with Altium Designer 20.1
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.
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What is a Schematic Netlist for Your PCB?
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.
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How to Select an Inductor for a Buck Converter
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.
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US Department of Transportation Seeking Alternatives to GPS
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.
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Bluetooth 5.1 SoC vs. Module: Which is Best for Your Design?
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.
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Altium 365 Getting Started User Guide - Available Now
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/
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USB Power Delivery for Your Next Project
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.
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Circuit Board Design for In-Circuit Testing
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.
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Planning for the Future with Cirris Systems and Altium
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.
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An Introduction to NFC
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.
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Editing Your PCB Geometry with MCAD Tools
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.
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The PCB Fabrication Process — what Every Design Engineer Needs To Know, Part 2
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.
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The PCB Fabrication Process—What Every Design Engineer Needs To Know, Part 1
There are still a number of designers - perhaps most of them - who have never toured a PCB fabrication facility. They are also unaware of the various steps that occur during the fabrication process. The purpose of this article is to describe those steps and what transpires in each of them. Part 1 of this article focuses on inner layer processing and the steps that are done prior the lamination process.
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Webinar "8 Reasons to Store Your Components in Altium 365"
Working with local libraries seems like a simple solution, but we often don’t take into account the added time spent maintaining libraries and sharing them between team members. This webinar showcases the advantages of component storage in Аltium 365 to resolve the issues of local libraries and component management.
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Bridging the Gap Between Designers and Customers
Every piece of electronic equipment starts with a great idea. Transforming great ideas into real, physical products takes a team of talented individuals and multiple companies coming together to make everything from the internal components to the external hardware. Paul Payen de la Garanderie, Founder and Owner of AW Audio, an engineering services company based in France, understands these challenges very well. With an extensive background in the Audio/Visual industry, Paul has had to work with multiple companies over the years, from small start-ups to celebrated AV firms.
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Additive PCB Manufacturing: The Vaccine for Electronics Supply Shocks?
At this time, at least a quarter of the world’s population is under quarantine, with workers unable to go to offices or factories, leading to fundamental disabling of the world economy. The electronics industry is suffering greatly as well, dealing with a supply shock from factories shutting down in Southeast Asia, to demand-side shocks from Western markets literally shutting down. Now it is the electrical engineers taking the lead with additive PCB manufacturing.
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