News & Updates
Our new article outlines strategies to achieve a 10% reduction in PCB costs by optimizing design and material choices, such as adjusting stack-up materials and hole sizes, using lower-cost parts, and considering single-sided assembly. These techniques help reduce expenses without sacrificing quality.
Check how Altium 365 helps eliminate EDA software vendor lock by enabling multi-CAD support in the cloud. This allows users to work with different CAD file formats within a single platform, enhancing collaboration and reducing the need for additional licenses. This approach offers greater flexibility and is set to transform the industry.
High-speed signal integrity is essential in PCB design to ensure data accuracy and system reliability. Key issues like impedance mismatches, crosstalk, and signal reflections need to be addressed through strategies such as controlled impedance traces, differential pairs, and suitable material choices. Check out our first article of the series about this topic.
Our new article on signal integrity in multi-board PCBs covers essential aspects like connector pinouts, cable designs, and interconnect strategies. These factors ensure reliable performance in high-speed applications across industries such as military, aerospace, and AI.
Discover how multi-CAD support is transforming electronics design with Altium 365 by enabling seamless integration of diverse CAD file formats. This innovation addresses vendor lock-in issues, boosting collaboration, version control, and project management across different CAD tools.
We invite you to explore a new chapter in the PiMX8 Project, focusing on the final stages of PCB layout design for the Pi.MX8 compute module. This installment covers critical topics such as routing power planes and signal delay tuning, essential for ensuring proper functionality and performance.
Thermoformed flexible PCBs are specially designed and fabricated by heating and molding them into specific shapes, making them suitable for compact and complex applications like automotive dashboards and wearable devices. This process involves precise temperature control and careful handling to ensure durability and quality. Discover more from Tara Dunn's new article.
Altium Designer's wire bonding feature enhances PCB design by supporting chip-up configurations for Chip on Board (CoB) designs. It offers easy validation of bond wiring in 3D views, ensuring accurate and efficient design processes. Check more about this feature on Altium's new feature page.
High-frequency surface-mount device (SMD) passives like resistors and capacitors play a crucial role in PCB layouts, particularly in circuits operating above 1 GHz. Our article explores how these components function at high frequencies, their operational limits, and the importance of considering parasitic elements in design.
The more complex the product gets, the more involved your customer will need to be to ensure you’re designing to their requirements. When you’re using a data sharing system that integrates with your PCB design tools, it’s easy to give your customers visibility into the product development process. Altium 365 is the only system that integrates with Altium Designer® and gives you the ability to give anyone access to your PCB projects, including your customers and manufacturer.
Anytime you’re looking for a fabricator to produce your new design, you should ensure they have a robust quality control program. Where can quality defects arise and how can manufacturers quickly get this information back to a design team? Sometimes emails can leave too much ambiguity and it is difficult to track progress on specific design changes in the PCB layout. If you’re planning to put a new design into high volume production, there are some basic points that should be checked during fabrication and assembly as part of a PCB manufacturing quality control program.
Controlling crosstalk is one of the key goals in any PCB design. In most instances, when we talk about crosstalk, it’s in reference to the unwanted interaction of the electromagnetic field traveling on one transmission line with a neighboring transmission line. But crosstalk can also occur in the connector pin out. This article will describe this type of crosstalk, the types of disruptions it causes, wherein the design cycle it needs to be factored in and how it can be successfully controlled.
When you’re working through a new PCB design project, and you need to keep track of your project revisions, Altium 365™ creates the ideal environment for collaborative PCB design and revision tracking. Once you upload your projects onto the cloud through the Altium 365 platform, Altium 365 creates a Git repository for your project. It allows you to make it available to collaborators through Altium Designer®. This includes a complete project history, which can be easily accessed by collaborators working on a complex project.
The moment you push your Gerbers to a manufacturer for a DFM inspection, it can be a nerve-wracking experience waiting for a response. Before you receive your working boards, there will likely be some back-and-forth communication before your board hits the fabrication line. When manufacturers and designers need to resolve problems in Gerber files before fabrication, it helps to have a Gerber compare utility. The newest version of Altium Designer now offers this feature through the Altium 365 platform, giving everyone visibility into changes to Gerbers before fabrication.
No matter how you might feel about renewable energy and associated environmental issues, electric vehicles are becoming more mainstream and will become the primary mode of transportation in the future. For the engineering community, what’s much more interesting is how our power distribution and management infrastructure can support this shift to massive increases in the use of electricity on the grid. So what’s the rub for PCB designers?
When you’re working through a complex PCB layout, it always helps to know the shortcuts you can use to stay productive. Altium Designer® keyboard shortcuts, and keyboard + mouse shortcuts, can help you easily walk through your PCB layout during design and as part of final checks during a design review. Here are some of my favorite keyboard shortcuts and viewing options that help me stay productive, and I hope they can do the same for you.
High speed PCB interconnects have continued to remain an active challenge in modeling and simulation, particularly when dealing with broadband signals. The IEEE P370 standard is a step towards addressing the challenges faced by many designers in determining broadband S-parameters for high speed structures up to 50 GHz. Although this standard has been in the works since 2015, it finally passed board approval and appears as an active draft standard.
Amplifiers can come in all shapes and sizes, depending on their bandwidth, power consumption, and many other factors. A Class-D amplifier design is normally used with high fidelity audio systems, and circuits for a Class-D amplifier are not too difficult to build in a schematic. If you’ve never worked with a Class-D amplifier or you’re looking for a fun audio project, follow along with this PCB layout.
Modern digital systems throw the digital electronics textbooks out the window, and high-speed DDR memories are a perfect example of the paradigm shift that occurs when you jump into IC and PCB design. With DDR5 still being finalized, and DDR6 now being discussed, designers who are already comfortable with DDR4 will need to consider how their design practices should adjust to accommodate the constant doubling of data speeds in these high-speed memory technologies.
In my experience, the somewhat vague information you might find in a typical crystal datasheet doesn’t enable an engineer to be wholly confident that their design expectations can be met. On the other hand, “blindly” adopting what the crystal datasheet says usually results in adequate frequency stability. If you want to get inside and uncover what is going on, you need to start thinking about the crystal as a phase-shifting network.
Antipads on vias and landing pads are a point of contention in modern PCB design, and the debate around the use of these elements in a multilayer PCB is framed as a binary choice. Like thermal reliefs, ground plane splits, and orthogonal routing, the debate around antipads on landing pads and vias is framed as an always/never choice. With today’s modern PCBs, it pays to understand the effects of antipads on signal integrity.
RF structures can be complicated to design and layout, particularly because many RF systems lead double lives as digital systems. Getting an analog signal out of a component and into a waveguide for high isolation routing is not so simple as placing a microstrip or stripline coming off your source component. Instead, you need to create a special microstrip to waveguide transition structure to ensure strong coupling into and out of your waveguide.
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.
Version control systems (VCS) have been around for a long time in the software world but can be surprisingly new to some folks in the electronics design industry. Version control tools are great for tracking and maintaining entire codebases without the old-school copying, pasting, zipping, and emailing steps many PCB designers use.
When it's time to release your project to your manufacturer, it's essential to ensure that all the necessary design aspects like assembly, BOM, and documentation are accurately and completely conveyed. Consistency is key to ensuring a successful release. Without clear release documentation, the designer faces increased risks of costly manufacturing response, time-consuming rework, or unintentional defects that can make it into the final product.
One of the most difficult and frustrating things to arise when traveling to a foreign country is the language barrier. Communicating a simple greeting can sometimes seem like a big hassle. The same thing is true for different CAD tools. When your tools aren’t speaking the same language, you’re going to run into problems. Bridge this gap by building out your component libraries with everything it takes to truly define a component, including 3D models that seamlessly propagate into the PCB editor and beyond.
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. There is no good way to avoid duplicate efforts with component creation and no standardization to ensure consistent naming. Worst of all, there is no way to identify the latest component revision, and library files can be easily corrupted or misplaced. This webinar showcases the advantages of component storage in Аltium 365 to resolve the issues of local libraries and component management.
This track is for the designer who is new to high-speed layout and routing practices and wants to understand how they relate to signal integrity, and how to get started designing for high-speed digital applications.
SPICE simulation saves you critical time in the prototyping phase. Understanding your simulation interface makes it simple to analyze how your circuits work in different scenarios. Altium Designer provides an intuitive, dedicated interface to support your simulation verification, setup, and analysis directly in your schematic environment. You also benefit from growing support for popular model formats, as well as generic models, simplifying circuit definition and simulation.
Differential data transmission lines usage can be challenging for even experienced designers. First you need to be familiar with the concepts of differential data transmission, find out why it is used, and what the potential advantage for your signal. This webinar will help you determine what part of your designs need differential pairs implementations and how to create such pairs with a given wave impedance in Altium Designer.
Being able to design a board in your ECAD environment doesn’t mean that it is manufacturable in real life. You have to make sure your CAD representation won’t have any problems in the real world by taking some precautions. For example, there are certain areas that need to be free of components and have specified clearances like your board edge. This webinar will help you get acquainted with the creation and modification of your board shape so that you can ensure manufacturability.
There are many aspects to designing a PCB. One of the larger aspects has to do with managing your components. We all need components for our designs, but are those components in our library and designs up-to-date or even purchasable? These questions need to be answered before we can safely use them. Altium Designer® has several tools to help you manage the components in your libraries and designs.
One major benefit of using a version control system is the ability to compare PCB design revisions against one another. If you are comparing PCB designs, you need a version control system that is electrically intelligent. It’s important to know who made a change, and when they made it. Altium Designer® and Altium 365® make file comparison easy.
This track is for the engineer who understands high-speed design requirements and wants to learn design practices to help ensure signal integrity and EMC with fast digital protocols, mixed-signal boards, and high layer counts.
Now you can assess your library’s health at a glance with the Library Health dashboard, view and share your bill of materials (BOM) and view and download PDF documents, all in your web browser. We improved the existing diff and compare features, and released a new version of MCAD CoDesigner. Register for the webinar to learn more!
It's no secret that software developers often use completed code fragments from other projects for quick and predictable results. The same can be done for PCB Design, there is no need to spend time rewiring schematics or laying out components on boards you’ve done before. Join us this webinar where we’ll go over how you can use your existing designs to create reusable design blocks, speeding up the design cycle for your future projects.
There are many aspects to designing a PCB. One of the larger aspects has to do with managing your components. We all need components for our designs, but are those components in our library and designs up-to-date or even purchasable? These questions need to be answered before we can safely use them. If not, we could just be wasting our time designing with invalid components. Altium Designer® has several tools to help you manage the components in your libraries and designs.
Component creation is a necessary evil when it comes to design, and it’s something we all need to do. But instead of spending hours creating your components and having them turn into a complete roadblock, let it be just a simple bump on the road. Altium Designer has several tools available to you in order to create the different aspects of a component, including the symbol, footprint, 3D model parametric data, supply chain information, and more
When you’re done creating a new board, it’s time to send your design data to the manufacturer. Before releasing your designs, you’ll want to make sure that everything is ready and works as intended. In this informative video, we’ll review some of the must-have checks before sending your output data for fabrication.