News & Updates
Blog
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How To Import Libraries and Manage Components With Altium 365
The problems you can experience with components and libraries are endless. These problems are the most significant source of design issues and the biggest reason behind respins, costing companies untold amounts of lost profit annually.
If you want to have a better understanding of how to use Altium 365 to maintain a strong and centralized library that is free of problems and headaches, you may want to consider attending this lecture.
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The High-Speed PCB Stackup Design Challenge
As much as we would like to build every high speed PCB perfectly, with ideal SI/PI/EMI characteristics, it isn’t always possible due to many practical constraints. Sometimes a stackup can be “good enough,” even for a high-speed PCB. This always comes from the need to balance engineering constraints, functional requirements, and the need to ensure signal and power integrity in a high-speed design, and finally to ensure compliance with EMC requirements.
On-Demand Webinar
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Ensuring First Pass Manufacturing Success
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.
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How I Improved My Collaboration Efficiency with Altium 365
Involving the whole team that will bring a product to completion early on in the development cycle is vital to efficient development. Design reviews with all the relevant parties are critical at each step of the design process, starting with high-level component selection, then through the schematic capture and PCB layout stages.
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Countersink and Counterbore
Ergonomics and convenience are important issues when designing a printed circuit board and the device as a whole. A lot of Altium Designer tools are aimed at solving them. These include Countersink and Counterbore holes, which allow the use of various types of screws in the mounting holes of the board.
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Migrating Data From Other Version Control Systems
The development of electronic devices always involves the release of many different types of files. And these files are not static - they change as the project progresses. When filling a project with data, a user creates new files, modifies outdated files that have become irrelevant. Managing project data is a separate task, especially for large developments where several participants with different specializations are involved in the process.
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Properties Panel Tuning
High-speed PCBs often require tuning groups of tracks, both single and differential. Altium Designer includes powerful tools that allow you to solve such tasks quickly and with high quality. Study this document and achieve the desired result even faster.
On-Demand Webinar
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Three Methods for Building MCAD Ready Components
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.
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Reflectionless Matching vs. Conjugate Matching: An Apparent Contradiction
There is one confusion related to impedance matching that comes up again and again, and it appears to be a fundamental confusion between reflection and power delivery. This leads to an apparent contradiction that arises when we try to generalize power delivery to wave reflection, despite the fact that the two were not meant to be related.
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Properties Panel Routing
Routing is one of the most time-consuming stages of PCB design. Altium Designer has a large set of tools that allow you to do it as accurately and quickly as possible. This document will help you to learn how to manage your routing effectively and use it to its fullest extent.
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IPC-2221 Calculator for PCB Trace Current and Heating
Aside from impedance and annular ring calculations, one of the other major formulas specified in the IPC 2221 standard relates temperature rise, trace width, and trace current. THere is also the IPC-2152 standard, both include this guidance on designing for thermal reliability, but which standard should we use?
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Stripline Impedance Calculator
Striplines provide some advantages over microstrips as they take advantage of natural shielding and coupling from nearby ground plane layers. Although they tend to experience higher losses due to total confinement in the dielectric, they can be thinner due to the high dielectric constant used in internal layers of a PCB. Use our free impedence calculator to help you determine the correct width needed to hit a target impedance.
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Which Types of Opto-Isolators Are Right For Your Signal?
An optoisolator is a cool electronic device that can be used to pass information between a diode without passing an electrical current. There are many great applications for these, but do you know which one is right for you?
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Properties panel document options in SCH editors
The Properties panel provides access to the properties of documents and objects. The contents of the panel change depending on the active document or the selected object. This blog will quickly go over some of need to know options around the properties panel in the schematic document.
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The High-Speed PCB Stackup Design Challenge
Even with all the good guidelines out there for high speed design, there are particular aspects of stackup construction and their relation to building boards that get overlooked. This blog is goes beyond just the typical SI/PI guidelines and looks at these problems from more of an engineering perspective.
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Everything You Need to Know About Stitching Vias
Stitching vias are something you often see spread around the surface layer of a PCB, but what are they? and should you be using them? In this guide, we'll go over some of the standard uses of stitching vias and when they should be used in a PCB.
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PCB Stackup Basics
In comparison to the build-up of a PCB, the stackup is more concerned with the electrical type of each layer, that is are we working with signals, power, or ground. Continue reading to learn how you can optimize your layer stack.
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Multi-board and Harness Design Capability in Altium Designer 23
Altium’s VP of marketing Lawrence Romine discusses the multi-board and harness design capabilities coming in Altium Designer 23.
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Controlled ESR Capacitors: Should You Use Them for Power Integrity?
Controlled ESR capacitors are important for power integrity in your design as they can help smooth out the PDN impedance spectrum in your high speed PCB.
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How Does the Package PDN Impact Power Integrity?
Whenever we say something to the effect of “components can’t work without a correctly designed PCB,” we only have to look at component packaging for evidence. It is true that component packages come with parasitics that affect signal integrity, but there is one area that we don’t often look at in terms of component packaging: power integrity.
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Designing Custom Hardware with Microcontrollers
In this article, we’ll look at all that is required to start creating your own custom microcontroller-based hardware designs. You’ll see that there actually isn’t too much to this, as microcontroller manufacturers over the years have tried to make the learning curve less steep and their devices more, and more accessible. This is both from an electrical point of view but also – equally importantly – from a programming point of view.
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Guide to Low-Dk PCB Materials
If you’ve taken time to learn about PCB material options and layer constructions, you have probably seen the wide range of materials that are available on the market. Materials companies produce laminates with varying Dk values, Tg values, weave styles, CTI values, and mechanical properties to target various applications in the electronics industry.
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Designing for V2X Communication: Wireless Protocols and Standards
If you’re waiting for truly connected cars on a grand scale, there is still a massive amount of work to be done, both on the hardware and software sides. Connected cars can only become a widespread reality once the automotive industry and telecom carriers can decide which protocol will work best for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. PCB designers will then need to step in to create these systems and fit them into a vehicular environment.
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Everything You Need to Know About Stitching Vias
This one area of PCB design can be contentious among some designers as it is related to copper pour, which it is often stated is not needed in most designs. Regardless of your feelings about copper pour, stitching vias have important uses in PCBs at low frequencies and at high frequencies.
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IPC-2221 Calculator for PCB Trace Current and Heating
The IPC-2221 standard includes many requirements for printed circuit board design and manufacturability, and there are several online calculators that have been developed based on this standard.
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All About Box Build Assemblies
When you’re ready to manufacture a new device at production volume, there are many aspects of the product that must come together. The enclosure, cabling and connectors, embedded software/firmware, and of course the PCBA all have to be considered in totality. There is a quick way to get your product into a usable enclosure, complete with input power and cabling, and with a form factor that fits your PCBA. This overused route to a new product is a box build assembly.
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