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’re designing a circuit board to be powered by anything except a bench-top regulated power supply, you’ll need to select a power regulator to place on your board. Just like any other component, your regulator has stated operating specs you’ll see in a product summary, and it has more detailed specs you’ll find in a datasheet. The fine details in your datasheets are easy to overlook, but they are the major factors that determine how your component will interact with the rest of your system.
It would be nice if the power that came from the wall was truly noise-free. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and although a power system can appear to output a clean sine wave, zooming into an oscilloscope trace or using an FFT will tell you a different story. When you take "dirty" power, put it through rectification, and then pass it through a switching regulator, you introduce additional noise into the system that further degrades power quality. If you’re a power supply or power systems designer, then you know the value of supplying your devices with clean, noise-free power.
If you’re an electronics designer or you’re just beginning your career as an engineer, the PCB stackup is probably one of the last things you’ll think about. Simple items like PCB copper thickness and board thickness can get pushed to the back burner, but you’ll need to think about these two points for many applications as not every board will be fabricated on a standard 1.57 mm two-layer PCB
I often get questions from designers asking about things like signal integrity and power integrity, and this most recent question forced me to think about some basic routing practices near planes and copper pour. "Is it okay to route signal traces on the same layer as power planes? I’ve seen some stackup guidelines that suggest this is fine, but no one provides solid advice." Once again, we have a great example of a long-standing design guideline without enough context.
Electronics schematics form the foundation of your design data, and the rest of your design documents will build off of your schematic. If you’ve ever worked through a design and made changes to the schematic, then you’re probably aware of the synchronization you need to maintain with the PCB layout. At the center of it all is an important set of data about your components: your schematic netlist. What’s important for designers is to know how the netlist defines connections between different components and schematics in a large project.
There are plenty of PCB manufacturing services you can find online, and they can all start to blend together. If you’re searching for a new service provider, it can be hard to compare all of them and find the best manufacturer that meets your needs. While experienced designers can spot bogus manufacturers from afar, there is always a temptation to go with the lowest priced, supposedly fastest overseas company you can find. However, there is a lot more that should go into choosing a PCB manufacturing service than just price.
Pi Filters are a type of passive filter that gets its name from the arrangement of the three constituent components in the shape of the Greek letter Pi (π). Pi filters can be designed as either low pass or high pass filters, depending on the components used. The low-pass filter used for power supply filtering is formed from an inductor in series between the input and output with two capacitors, one across the input and the other across the output. Keep reading to learn more about their application in the PCB Design.
The first question that should come up when selecting materials and planning a stackup is: what materials are needed and how many layers should be used? Assuming you’ve determined you need a low-loss laminate and you’ve determined your required layer count, it’s time to consider whether you should use a hybrid stackup. There are a few broad situations where you could consider using a hybrid stackup with low-loss laminates in your PCB
Batteries offer a great power source for electrical devices that need to be mobile or located somewhere where connection to a mains electricity supply or other power source is impossible. The biggest problem with battery power is the expectation of users that the device will operate for significant periods with the need for recharging or replacing the batteries. This demand is placing the onus on the designer to improve efficiency and reduce power demand to meet this need.
A number of us on this blog and in other publications often bring up the concept of target impedance when discussing power integrity in high-speed designs. Some designs will be simple enough that you can take a “set it and forget it” approach to design a functional prototype. For more advanced designs, or if you’re fine-tuning a new board that has existing power integrity problems, target impedance is a real consideration that should be considered in your design.
Dual power supplies are circuits that generate two different output voltages from a single input source. The simplest method of generating dual output voltages is to use a transformer with two taps on the output winding. Bespoke transformers can have any voltage ratio depending on the number of windings in each part of the output side of the transformer.
With digital boards that are nominally running at DC, splitting up a power plane or using multiple power planes is a necessity for routing large currents at standard core/logic levels to digital components. Once you start mixing analog and digital sections into your power layers with multiple nets, it can be difficult to implement clean power in a design if you’re not careful with your layout.
High-speed digital PCBs are challenging enough to design, but what about mixed-signal boards? Many modern systems contain elements that operate with both digital and analog signaling, and these systems must be designed to ensure signal integrity in both domains. Altium Designer has the layout and signal integrity tools you need to ensure your mixed-signal PCB design does not experience interference and obeys important design standards.
Just as WiFi 6 and 6E are starting to hit the market and new chipsets become available, WiFi 7 is in the works under the 802.11be standard. While this technology still has not hit the market, I would expect more inquiries for experimental systems, evaluation modules, and surface-mountable modules to come up once the first chipsets become available. Now is the time to start thinking about these systems, especially if you’re developing evaluation products to support WiFi 7.
Rugged electronics need to take a punch mechanically, but there is more that goes into a rugged system than being able to survive a drop on the pavement. This is as much about enclosure design as it is about component selection and manufacturing choices. Mil-aero designers often use the term “harsh environment” to describe a number of scenarios where an electronic device’s reliability and lifetime will be put to the test. If you want to make your next product truly rugged, it helps to adopt some of their strategies in your PCB layout.
There are many quality checks used to ensure a design will be manufacturable at scale and with high quality, but a lot of this can happen in the background without the designer realizing. No matter what level of testing and inspection you need to perform, it’s important to determine the basic test requirements your design must satisfy and communicate these to your manufacturer. If it’s your first time transitioning from prototyping to high-volume production, read our list of PCB testing requirements so that you’ll know what to expect.
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.