News & Updates
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.
Check out this article where Rafał Stępień dives into the essentials of maintaining signal integrity in high-speed digital systems. Discover key techniques like controlling signal reflections, reducing crosstalk, and designing differential pairs in Altium Designer 24 to ensure reliable and efficient PCB performance.
The Requirements & Systems Portal is now live in Altium 365! Engineers can write, manage, and verify requirements within the Altium 365 workspace. You can link your requirements directly to schematics and PCB designs to ensure all engineers are working with the latest data. Request access today!
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.
Looking to enhance signal integrity in your PCB designs? Check out our latest article by David Marrakchi, where he shares key strategies and best practices for achieving reliable high-speed designs.
Layouts for complex electrical systems may need to make extensive use of copper pour to provide ground nets, power nets, shielding, and other copper structures for power and signal integrity. Backplanes, motherboards, RF products, and many other complex layouts will make use of copper pour and polygons that can’t be easily placed as custom components. The rules-driven design engine in Altium Designer® also ensures that any PCB polygon pour you place in your PCB layout will comply with clearance rules and will be checked against other electrical design rules.
If you need to connect multiple boards into a larger system and provide interconnections between them, you’ll likely use a backplane to arrange these boards. Backplanes are advanced boards that borrow some elements from high speed design, mechanical design, high voltage/high current design, and even RF design. They carry their own set of standards that go beyond the reliability requirements in IPC.
The upcoming Gen6 version of PCIe is pushing the limits of signal integrity for many computer systems designers. As with any high-speed signaling standard, signal integrity is a major design consideration, which requires the right set of design and analysis techniques. Rather than digging deep to find PCIe 5.0 signal integrity requirements from PCI-SIG, we’ve compiled the important points for today’s PCB layout engineers. Layout engineers should pay attention here as these design requirements will become more stringent in later PCIe generations.
An essential aspect of project management is time management, especially when your design team is working remotely. Your time management strategy is team-based and individual, but time can easily get spent on important tasks when working as part of a team. So how can you streamline important collaboration tasks for your design team to increase productivity?
In these days of easily-available internet and quarantines, everyone is working remotely. It’s nice being able to spend time with family and regain control over your schedule, but keeping track of projects and revisions while securing user access feels like its own job. With the right set of project and data management tools, you can easily share your data with collaborators without tracking email chains.
When I started using my Altium 365 Workspace for collaboration, I found I could make things run more smoothly when I kept things organized. However, I prevented any issues thanks to all the organization tools built into the Explorer panel within Altium Designer. Let’s take a look at how you can get the most value out of your Altium 365 Workspace in terms of organization and access management.
PCB manufacturing is competitive, and there is plenty of worldwide manufacturing capacity for new boards. If you’re looking for a manufacturer for your next project, it can be difficult to determine who is the best option to produce your board. Different fabricators and assemblers offer different levels of service, different capabilities, and access to different processes and materials. There are a lot of options to consider when selecting a manufacturer for your project.
Ever since I started using Github and Google Docs, I fell in love with revision control. Instead of keeping multiple copies of essential files and time-stamping every revision, revision tracking information gets stored alongside the file. This environment works great for code, spreadsheets, and documents, and Altium brings these same features into PCB design.
With advances in industrial automation, automotive technology, remote sensing, and much more, image processing is taking center stage in many embedded systems. Image processing with older video systems was difficult or impossible due to the low quality of many imaging systems with perpetual uptime. Newer systems provide video with higher frame rates and higher resolution images, but these systems still needed to connect directly to a computer in order to enable any useful image processing applications.
EDA tools have come a long way since the advent of personal computing. Now advanced routing features like auto-routers, interactive routing, length tuning, and pin-swapping are helping designers stay productive, especially as device and trace densities increase. Routing is normally restricted to 45-degree or right-angle turns with typical layout and routing tools, but more advanced PCB design software allows users to route at any angle they like. So which routing style should you use, and what are the advantages of any angle routing?
If you do a search for “Hardware-in-the-Loop” testing, you will frequently find examples of complex, real-time systems. Article from National Instruments, for example, gives a nice explanation and background on what hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) is, and provides an example of testing electronic control units within an automobile. In this article, we will be focusing on a smaller, more bite-sized version of HIL testing concepts.
If you’re an antenna designer, then you’re likely familiar with all aspects of near-field vs. far-field radiation. Given the litany of radiated EMI problems that cause noise within and outside of an electronic device, one might suddenly realize their new product is acting like a strong antenna. To understand how EMI affects your circuits, it helps to understand exactly how near-field vs. far-field radiation from your PCB affects your ability to pass EMC checks and affects your circuits.
How often have you started down the PCB development process and been bogged down by time-consuming administrative tasks? Once you get ready for production, working through a design review and correcting any DFM problems takes its own share of time. With hastening product development timelines and shorter product life cycles comes the pressure to increase PCB prototype iteration speed without sacrificing cost or quality. So how can PCB design teams keep their development schedules on track without sacrificing quality or risking a failed prototyping run?
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, or so the aphorism goes. I think it’s worth noting that the first step is the most difficult to take. Analysis Paralysis is especially true when dealing with a new software package, including the recent release of Concord Pro. The recent version has brought with it a deluge of interest and enthusiasm in such a phenomenal tool. But I must say, Altium hit this one out of the park.
When you need to pass EMC certification and your new product is being crippled by a mysterious source of EMI, you’ll probably start considering a complete product redesign. Your stackup, trace geometry, and component arrangement are good places to start, but there might be more you can do to suppress specific sources of EMI. There are many different types of EMI filters that you can easily place in your design, and that will help suppress EMI in a variety of frequency ranges.
Previously, I described the PCB fabrication operations relative to inner layer processing, lamination, drilling, and plating. The last step in the process is outer layer processing which is described below. Once the desired plated copper thickness of a PCB has been achieved, it’s necessary to etch away the copper between the features in order to define the outer layer pattern.
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.
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.
Watch the webinar and get a sneak peek at revolutionizing your engineering, compliance, and procurement approach with Altium 365 and Z2Data integration. Leverage comprehensive component data and advanced risk management strategies to enhance resilience in your operations.
Watch our webinar and learn how to design PCBs while staying compliant with US government security regulations. Understand the differences between commercial Altium 365 and Altium 365 GovCloud in real-case scenarios.
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.
Have you ever dealt with a component shortage or unexpected EOL causing a design change at the last minute? Watch our webinar to learn how to solve these problems and overcome production blockers with Altium 365 and Basler AR!
Do you need help with disjointed design and requirement processes? Watch the webinar and learn how Altium 365 Requirements Manager powered by Valispace connects design data and requirements for faster design with fewer errors.
Watch the webinar to learn how the SiliconExpert Integration in Altium 365 can optimize your workflows and elevate your design process. Make data-driven design decisions!
Watch the webinar and learn from Altium's Director of Security, Bruno Blasigh, and Renata Lang, Altium 365 Product Marketing Manager, about designing PCBs that meet US government requirements using Altium 365's GovCloud.
Learn how the SiliconExpert integration in Altium 365 can optimize your workflows and elevate your design process. Hear from experts from SiliconExpert and discover insights into data-driven design decisions. Also don't miss the chance to see the integration in action and explore improved risk analysis and alternative component discovery features.
Dive into the world of Altium's MCAD CoDesigner and its compatibility with SOLIDWORKS. Watch the recording to explore a unified approach with a real-life project that will redefine your design process and find out more about how you can optimize your Electronic Lifecycle Management by bringing together all experts involved in product development.
Looking for a way to reduce time and increase the accuracy of the manual assembly of PCBs? Watch this webinar recording for a transformative session and learn how XVP Photonics achieved these goals with Assembly Assistant!
? Join our experts to learn how you can develop products faster with fewer errors with the Altium 365 + Valispace Integration. This integration connects your live design and requirements workflow to implement design intent better and comply with industry standards.
An exclusive Expert Panel Discussion on Altium 365 GovCloud featuring industry experts Mahesh Venugopala and Bruno Blasigh. Gain valuable insights on cloud security, compliance, and more.
Join our insightful webinar on Altium 365 Version Control System (VCS) designed for solo users, where Ari Mahpour will guide you through creating and managing projects on the cloud-based platform.
Get ready to speed up your design process with new Altium Designer collaboration capabilities. Designing a PCB is a team effort. Engineers must work with customers, manufacturers, and other stakeholders to get the best results. You need help to bring your design to life, even if you're a one-person team.