News & Updates

Altium Designer 21 features many powerful tools for creating and editing your rigid-flex board shape. We’ll show you how to use to the board planning mode to create board shape and define regions as well as edit their properties for easy identification and functionality.

Learn how Breville, a consumer electronics company from Australia, was able to speed up its product development process by at least four times with Altium 365. 

How to use the Property Panel in Altium Designer: The properties panel is your information hub for all objects in Altium Designer. Watch this video to learn how to best use the properties dialog in Altium Designer. 

Routes for your design can get messy, leading to inefficiency and waste. Altium Designer’s Glossing features can help! We’ll show you how to clean up your interactive routing as you route, how to gloss tracks already routed, and some tips and tricks to clean them up exactly how you want them.

This video shows how to tent vias in Altium Designer by using design rules. Since vias are often located very close to pads, during assembly, solder paste sometimes flows into vias, which, in turn, leads to poor soldering quality. To avoid this, cover vias with a solder mask layer.

For high-speed projects where there are lines with a given impedance, it is important to maintain a consistent return signal path. For the return signal, reference planes are created in the form of polygons and the polygons must maintain integrity along the entire path of the signal. This video shows how consistent return paths are created and validated. 

Once you’ve pulled your components with an ECO into the PCB you may need to edit them. We’ll show you how to edit your components in the PCB view.

When dealing with high frequency boards, it is necessary to match the timing of certain nets and differential pairs. In this video, we’ll go over how to use the tuning tool to match trace lengths based on the design rules. Using the Interactive Length Tuning command, you will begin tuning and can then use the Properties panel to configure the properites of the tuning segment.

This video demonstrates how to use the justification function to align text on the PCB.

When dealing with high-frequency boards it's necessary to match the timing of certain nets and differential pairs. In this video, we’ll go over how to use the tuning tool to match trace lengths based on design rules. 

Board shapes can be edited and managed several different ways in Altium Designer. We’ll show you how using 2D and 3D modes and models as well as importing from DXF or DWG.

In this video, we show how to determine the impedance of a coplanar stripline. The impedance is configured on the Impedance tab of the Layer Stack Manager. When calculating the impedance, the Layer Stack Manager takes into account the material parameters and the distance to the return conductors.

Keepout regions are easy to create in Altium Designer, but they can be complex. We’ll show you a few ways to make creating your more complex keepout shapes easier and more efficient.

In this video, you will see how to use the courtyard layer as a component boundary.

You can create, configure, and utilize xSignals in Altium Designer to make your design process more efficient and effective. We’ll show you how to do it manually, using the more comprehensive Create xSignals command, and using the xSignal wizard.

The MCAD CoDesigner in Altium Designer allows for seamless design transfer between the Electrical and Mechanical designers. In this overview, we’ll show you how to transfer from Altium Designer to your CAD tool of choice, then how to resize the board, add mounting holes, add a new connector, and update the board design in Altium Designer.