News & Updates
Explore the future of wire bonding, from new applications to cost-saving trends, in this article by Samer Aldhaher. Stay updated on key innovations in this essential connection technology.
Discover how Altium 365’s Jira integration can streamline collaboration and keep projects running smoothly with real-time design updates and task tracking. Perfect for teams seeking efficiency!
Watch this webinar and learn how online BOM management systems, like Altium 365 BOM Portal, can transform your approach to transparency, collaboration, and regulatory compliance in the electronics sector.
Discover how integrating BOM management and CAD systems can streamline your PCB design process in this insightful article. Learn how combining these tools enables smoother collaboration, reduces errors, and improves design efficiency, helping you optimize your workflows from concept to manufacturing.
Watch this webinar to learn how the SiliconExpert Integration in Altium 365 can optimize your workflows and elevate your design process.
Want to keep your entire team on the same page? Watch this webinar to discover how Altium 365’s suite of applications revolutionizes electronics design from conception to production.
Resistors are fundamental components in electronic circuits, essential for controlling current and voltage. This article explores their basic principles, types, and key applications, helping you understand their crucial role in electronics.
Efficient PCB design is crucial for avoiding costly delays in product development. This article offers practical tips and best practices for PCB designers to streamline their workflows, minimize errors, and ensure timely project completion.
Signal integrity is the backbone of high-speed digital systems. In this new article by Rafał Stępień, we break down signal reflections and how to optimize your designs with effective impedance matching techniques.
Tired of juggling multiple tools for project management? Learn how the Jira Integration for Altium 365 can optimize your workflows.
In the second article of the "Mastering EMI Control in PCB Design" series Dario Fresu explores how effective component placement can reduce electromagnetic interference (EMI) in printed circuit boards. He highlights strategies such as board segregation and careful management of high-speed signals and their harmonics to ensure signal integrity and minimize emissions.
If you need to capture sound waves for your electrical device to process, you'll need a microphone. However, microphones these days have become very advanced, and there are so many options to choose from. They range from the relatively simple and popular condenser type microphones to state-of-the-art sound conversion solutions incorporating internal amplifiers and other electronic processing functionality. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the options available.
There are many times where you need an amplifier with high gain, low noise, high slew rate, and broad bandwidth simultaneously. However, not all of these design goals are possible with all off-the-shelf components. Here are some points to consider when working with a composite amplifier design and how to evaluate your design with the right set of circuit simulation tools.
Simple switching regulator circuits that operate in compact spaces, like on a small PCB, can usually be deployed in noisy environments without superimposing significant noise on the output power level. As long as you lay out the board properly, you’ll probably only need a simple filter circuit to remove EMI on the inputs and outputs. As the regulator becomes larger, both physically and electrically, noise problems can become much more apparent, namely radiated EMI and conducted EMI in the PCB layout.
A PCB design review is a practice to review the design of a board for possible errors and issues at various stages of product development. It can range from a formal checklist with official sign-offs to a more free-form inspection of schematic drawings and PCB layouts. For this article, we will not delve into what to check during a design review process but rather look at how a review process itself usually unfolds and how to optimize it to get the most out of your time.
As we established in Part 1, the PCB design review and collaboration practices have room for improvement in many organizations. To address this, we developed Altium 365. Let's examine how running a PCB project through Altium 365 compares to other methods.
If you look on the internet, you'll find some interesting grounding recommendations, and sometimes terminology gets thrown around and applied to a PCB without the proper context or understanding of real electrical behavior. DC recommendations get applied to AC, low current gets applied to high current, and vice versa... the list goes on. One of the more interesting grounding techniques you'll see as a recommendation, including on some popular engineering blogs within the industry, is the use of PCB star grounding.
Every PCB has silkscreen on the surface layer, and you’ll see a range of alphanumeric codes, numbers, markings, and logos on PCB silkscreen. What exactly does it all mean, and what specifically should you include in your silkscreen layer? All designs are different, but there are some common pieces of information that will appear in any silkscreen in order to aid assembly, testing, debug, and traceability
Designing high-speed channels on complex boards requires simulations, measurements on test boards, or both to ensure the design operates as you intend. Gibbs ringing is one of these effects that can occur when calculating a channel’s response using band-limited network parameters. Just as is the case in measurements, Gibbs ringing can occur in channel simulations due to the fact that network parameters are typically band-limited.
In electronics, there is the possibility that your PCB can get pretty hot due to power dissipation in certain components. There are many things to consider when dealing with heat in your board, and it starts with determining power dissipation in your design during schematic capture. If you happen to be operating within safe limits in a high power device, you might need an SMD heat sink on certain components. Ultimately, this could save your components, your product, and even the operator.
One thing is certain: power supply designs can get much more complex than simply routing DC power lines to your components. RF power supply designs require special care to ensure they will function without transferring excessive noise between portions of the system, something that is made more difficult due to the high power levels involved. In addition to careful layout, circuitry needs to be designed such that the system provides highly efficient power conversion and delivery to each subsection of the system.
Overvoltage, overcurrent, and heat are the three most likely events that can destroy our expensive silicon-based components or reduce our product’s life expectancy. The effects are often quite instant, but our product might survive several months of chronic overstress before giving up the ghost in some cases. Without adequate protection, our circuit can be vulnerable to damage, so what should we do? Or do we need to do anything?
Today’s PCB designers and layout engineers often need to put on their simulation hat to learn more about the products they build. When you need to perform simulations, you need models for components, and simulation models often need to be shared with other team members at the project level or component level. What’s the best way for Altium Designer users to share this data? Read this article to learn more about sharing your models with other design participants.
When some designers start talking materials, they probably default to FR4 laminates. The reality is there are many FR4 materials, each with relatively similar structure and a range of material property values. Designs on FR4 are quite different from those encountered at the low GHz range and mmWave frequencies. So what exactly changes at high frequencies, and what makes these materials different? To see just what makes a specific laminate useful as an RF PCB material, take a look at our guide below.
In today’s fast-paced world where iterations of electronics are spun at lightning speeds, we often forget one of the most critical aspects of development: testing. Even if we have that fancy test team, are we really able to utilize them for every modification, every small and insignificant change that we make to our prototypes? In this article, we will review a very low cost, yet highly effective and quite exhaustive test system that will get you that bang for your buck that you’ve been looking for.
If you’ve ever looked at the BOM for a reference design or an open-source project, you may have seen a comment in some of the entries in your BOM. This comment is either “DNP” or “DNI”. If you think about it, every component placed in the PCB requires some level of placement and routing effort, which takes time and money if you’re working for a client. This begs the question, why would anyone design a board with components they don’t plan to include in the final assembly?
When it’s time to share your design data with your manufacturer, it’s like taking a leap of faith. Sending off a complete documentation package might seem as easy as placing your fab files in a zip folder, but there are better ways to ensure your manufacturer understands your project and has access to all your design data. For Altium Designer users, there are multiple options for creating and packaging release data into a complete package for your manufacturers.
Watch this webinar and learn how online BOM management systems, like Altium 365 BOM Portal, can transform your approach to transparency, collaboration, and regulatory compliance in the electronics sector.
Watch this webinar to learn how the SiliconExpert Integration in Altium 365 can optimize your workflows and elevate your design process.
Want to keep your entire team on the same page? Watch this webinar to discover how Altium 365’s suite of applications revolutionizes electronics design from conception to production.
Tired of juggling multiple tools for project management? Learn how the Jira Integration for Altium 365 can optimize your workflows.
Watch our webinar to learn more about the new application joining the Altium 365 suite. The new Requirements & Systems Portal will help align engineering teams to get to market quicker.
Watch our webinar to learn how our centralized electronics design data platform can quickly integrate with your IT access, tracking, and compliance tools, while also making it easier to work in teams.
Learn how to make informed decisions and mitigate supply chain risks with Altium 365 BOM Portal. Improve your time to market and proactively manage supply chain risks.
Struggling with manual data errors in your electronics projects? Watch the webinar to learn how Altium 365 cloud PLM integration with Duro® minimizes errors and rework, saving you time and money.
Learn how Valispace is transforming the world of requirements and systems engineering, enabling teams to do super fast design iterations and develop quality products while ensuring they comply with standards and regulations.
Watch the webinar to learn how the SiliconExpert Integration in Altium 365 can optimize your workflows and elevate your design process. Start making data-driven design decisions today!
Is juggling multiple ECAD file formats slowing down your team? If so, watch this webinar and learn how to remove ECAD data silos to enhance design collaboration, efficiently manage all your BOMs, and reduce supply chain risks with Altium 365 Multi-CAD File Support.
Watch the webinar to discover how Altium 365 Cloud PLM Integration with Arena® can optimize your electronics product development processes. Benefit from automated data flow, eliminating manual input and minimizing errors that lead to costly rework.
Watch the webinar that brings together the expertise of Altium 365 and AWS to introduce the specialized Altium 365 GovCloud within the robust AWS GovCloud infrastructure. This session is designed for IT and security professionals seeking advanced data protection and access control solutions for their electronics development teams.
Watch the webinar to explore the benefits of agile methodologies and how they can be translated into the physical world of hardware development! Learn how Altium 365 can support the adoption of this approach.
Watch our webinar and discover how Altium 365 GovCloud can assist you in PCB design while ensuring compliance with US government regulations.
Watch this webinar and learn how to remove ECAD data silos to enhance design collaboration, efficiently manage all your BOMs, and reduce supply chain risks with Multi-CAD File Support.