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Simple Simulation in Altium Designer
On-Demand Webinar
SPICE Simulation Made Simple

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.

Design Reuse Blocks Update
Blog
Altium Designer 22.9 Update

We are happy to announce that the Altium Designer 22.9 update is now available. Altium Designer 22.9 continues to focus on improving the user experience, as well as performance and stability of the software, based on feedback from our users. Check out the key new features in the What's New section on the left side of this window!

Dual Rail Voltage Supply
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Dual Rail Voltage Supply

The highest performing operational amplifiers often need a split supply with positive and negative voltages connected to the op amps supply rails. In this project, we’re going to be building a positive/negative dual rail power supply for a differential oscilloscope probe I’m designing. I’m making the power supply a separate project, as a dual rail supply is quite useful to have, and I’m sure I’ll find multiple uses for it in the future.

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How-To's
Show the Net Connections Between Select Components

This video demonstrates how to show net-specific component connections. This is helpful when routing as you’re able to reduce clutter and focus on the connections on which you are working.

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How to Work with Draftsman
Draftsman Editor Settings

In this video we’ll go over the Draftsman editor settings and properties so you know how to set up the editor to be exactly what you need.

Library Importer Interface
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Library Importer Improvements (former Library Migrator)

Importing file-based libraries from your local computer or network drive to your Altium 365 workspace can be done using the Library Importer. Altium’s Library Migrator was renamed Library Importer—the feature’s name was changed to conform more closely to the tool’s purpose. Not only is its name new, but our team has also made several user experience improvements. We have updated the documentation to reflect this change.

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How to Select Copper Foil for High-Frequency PCB Design

The PCB materials industry has spent significant amounts of time developing materials that provide lowest possible signal loss for products with RF applications. For high speed and high frequency designs, losses will limit signal propagation distance and distort signals, and it will create an impedance deviation that can be seen in TDR measurements. In this article, we'll look at the balance between copper foil losses and other types of losses in a PCB, as well as some strategies that are commonly used to overcome roughness.

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How-To's
Assuring Your Board Is Large Enough to House All Components

This video covers how to make sure your board is big enough to house all your components.

Blog
Altium Designer 22.8 Update

We are happy to announce that the Altium Designer 22.8 update is now available. Altium Designer 22.8 continues to focus on improving the user experience, as well as performance and stability of the software, based on feedback from our users. Check out the key new features in the What's New section on the left side of this window!

What is Hybrid Beamforming?
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What is Hybrid Beamforming?

In this article, we’ll look at beamforming implementation in an advanced method combining analog and digital techniques, known as hybrid beamforming. This method blends both digital and analog techniques to create multiple beams and thus reach multiple users with varying intensities. In the case of an RF imaging system or a radar system, hybrid beamforming in a MIMO technique also allows tracking of multiple targets with adjustable resolution.

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On-Demand Webinar
PCB Design in Altium Designer with Differential Data Transfer

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.

Is your via impedance calculator accurate?
Blog
Why Most Via Impedance Calculators Are Inaccurate

The problem with every via impedance calculator that I have seen is simple: they are incomplete or totally wrong. The “incomplete” part refers to a lack of context; these calculators can roughly reproduce a well-known estimate from a legend like Howard Johnson in his Digital Design textbooks. However, these calculators never provide insight into what they are actually calculating, or where the calculated via impedance is accurate. Keep reading to see why these calculators get it so wrong, as well as the context surrounding via impedance.

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How-To's
How to Create an Interactive PDF of a Schematic Diagram

This video shows how to create an interactive PDF using the Smart PDF Wizard.

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How to Work with Draftsman
What is the Draftsman Document?

Once your PCB layout is finished it’s time for review. This is where the Draftsman Document and Altium Designer’s Draftsman Editor comes in.

Blog
Buck Converter Simulation in Altium Designer

When designing high power circuits (usually very high voltage and/or current), you’ll need to create a regulator from scratch and place it in your PCB layout. It's also the case that you may want to model a real component using discretes in a simulation in order to qualify the system's expected operating regime. As part of buck converter design, you can easily run a buck converter simulation directly in Altium Designer’s schematic editor. Here’s how you can access these features in the newest version of Altium Designer. 

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How to work with Multiboard
Adding Project Modules to a Multi-board Schematic

If you’re using multiple PCBs in your Multi-board design, Altium Designer allows you to add existing projects directly to your schematic with modules. We’ll show you how to quickly and efficiently add these projects to your Multi-board design.

PCIe 6.0 Overview
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Overview of the PCIe 6.0 Standard

Just as you get used to PCIe 5.0, they decide to release another standard! The newest iteration of PCIe is Gen6, or PCIe 6.0. PCIe 6.0 brings a doubling of channel bandwidth through introduction of PAM-4 as the signaling method in high-speed differential channels. This signaling method is a first for PCIe, and it’s an important enabler of the doubled data rate we see in the current standard. In this article, I’ll run over the important points in the standard and what PCB designers can expect when designing these channels.

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How-To's
Checking for Creepage in High Voltage Designs

High voltage devices have leakage currents that propage over the surface of the board. In such devices, it's important to consider not only the standard gap between the two topological elements, but also the shortest possible path between them, taking into account cut-outs and holes. With Altium Designer 20, you can check for creepage using the new creepage distance rule.

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How to create a PCB Footprint
Creating BGA Footprints with the Footprint Wizard

Altium Designer makes it easy to create a BGA footprint using our IPC compliant footprint wizard. We'll show you how easily you can create and modify a BGA footprint using the footprint wizard.

SPI vs. I2C For Memory Access
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SPI vs. I2C: How to Choose the Best Protocol for Your Memory Chips

One of the common implementations of SPI and I2C in a PCB layout is as a protocol for reading and writing to an external Flash memory. Flash chips are a very common component in embedded systems and can offer high capacities of non-volatile memory up to Gb values. When choosing a memory chip, you'll want to match the application requirements and functionality with the bus speed you need for read and write operations in your memory chip. There is also the matter of the type of Flash memory you'll need to access (NOR vs. NAND).

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Project history in Altium Designer
Blog
Getting Started with Revision Control in Altium 365

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.

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Image Processing Embedded Systems with Modular Hardware

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.

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Blog
Any Angle Routing: When Should You Use It?

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?

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Blog
Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing: An Introduction

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.

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Blog
Near-field vs. Far-field EMI: What's Causing Noise Problems in My PCB?

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.

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Increasing PCB Prototype Iteration Speed in the Cloud

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?

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Why you should be using Concord Pro?

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.

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What Types of EMI Filters are Best for Passing EMC Certification?

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.

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An Overview Of PCB Outer Layer Processing

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.

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How Do Pads and Vias Impact Total Capacitor Parasitic Inductance?

There are many factors at play in determining the impact of inductance on high-frequency power distribution systems. Two topic areas, inductance of the decoupling capacitor and inductance of the power planes, were addressed in earlier articles. This article will focus on the inductance of the capacitor footprint and via inductance from the capacitor footprint back to the PCB power planes.

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Analyzing Crosstalk on FIFO and DDR4 Parallel Bus Interfaces

High-speed buses, whether single-ended or differential, can experience any number of signal integrity problems. A primary problem created by propagating signals is crosstalk, where a signal superimposes itself on a nearby trace. The industry-standard PCB design tools in Altium Designer® already include a post-layout simulator for examining crosstalk. Still, you can speed up crosstalk analysis in parallel buses when you use a powerful field solver.

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Amplifier Stability at High Frequencies and Stray Capacitance

Any time-dependent physical system with feedback and gain has conditions under which the system will reach stable behavior. Amplifier stability extends these concepts to amplifiers, where the system output can grow to an undesired saturated state due to unintended feedback. If you use the right design and simulation tools, you can easily account for potential instability in your circuit models before you create your layout.

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Working with Design Variants

The concept of design variants entails taking a single PCB design, and then on the assembly side, modifying specific components used in the design. Either by not installing, not installing, or choosing alternate components as replacements on a specific assembly to ultimately create different end products. In that way, you could support multiple product lines. This article describes the approach to working with variants. 

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Setting Up Concord Pro Revisions and Lifecycle

Before anything else, some advice. The revisions and lifecycle are an area that takes some planning. It used to be that Concord Pro was primarily for components, but now it has gone far beyond that. With the ability to store and manage many other items, including your various templates, projects, even PDF documents, not everything will have the same revision scheme. Concord Pro is so powerful that it can handle any revision scheme you’d want to set up.

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How to Successfully Design a BGA

Whether the board will be placed in a high pressure vessel or underwater, your design will need to withstand pressure to avoid failure. On the enclosure side, your vessel should be rated up to a certain pressure and may require frequent cycling to prevent implosion. On the electronics side, component selection and layout (especially at high voltage) become critical to preventing failure and ensuring reliability.

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Altium Designer 20.2 Update 1 is now available

The first update of Altium Designer 20.2 and Altium NEXUS Client 3.2 is now available. You can update through the Altium Designer update system ("Extensions and Updates") or download fresh builds from the Downloads section of the Altium website. Click on "Read More" to see a list of all changes in this update.

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Embedded thumbnail for Coming Soon: Ansys CoDesigner
How-To's
Coming Soon: Ansys CoDesigner

Ansys CoDesigner (which will be released on the13th of December) simplifies your design process by connecting ECAD and Simulation to eliminate manual export/import steps. With features like design change synchronization and commenting, Altium Designer ECAD engineers and Ansys Electronics Desktop (AEDT) SIM engineers can collaborate seamlessly in one workspace.

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How-To's
Coming Soon: Automatic Multi-Net Tuning

Automatic Multi-Net Tuning enhances PCB design accuracy and efficiency by automatically adjusting multiple nets simultaneously to meet specific design rules, including length and delay. Learn more about this feature, which will be released on December 13th. Its flexibility enables effective work with differential pairs and traces at any angle. It not only identifies but also rectifies issues related to automatic length tuning, ensuring your designs adhere to key standards without the need for manual adjustments.

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How-To's
Coming Soon: PCB CoDesign

PCB CoDesign makes it easier for everyone to work together and meet project deadlines. In Altium Designer 24, which is scheduled for release on December 13th, we are introducing a new feature. This feature optimizes your resources through a Git-like approach, allowing multiple team members to work simultaneously and commit changes to a master branch. This expedites the design process and lowers project costs.

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How-To's
Coming Soon: MultiBoard Draftsman

MultiBoard Draftsman enhances the efficiency of design reviews and assembly precision by offering a unified platform for detailed viewing and documentation of MultiBoard Designs. Discover more about this feature in our brand-new short video.

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How-To's
Coming Soon: PCB Layout Replication

PCB Layout Replication allows quick replication of layouts for repetitive circuitry blocks in a flat PCB design. In this short video we will show you how this new tool (scheduled for release on December 13th) eliminates the need to do repetitive tasks manually or for various workarounds like snippets or multi-channel designs.

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How-To's
Coming Soon: Constraint Manager

Constraint Manager simplifies PCB design by facilitating collaborative constraint definition from both Schematic and PCB. Learn more about this new feature, which streamlines the process of setting electrical clearances and creating rules while centralizing class management for time-saving convenience.

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Simulation in Altium Designer
Debounce Circuit

Learn how to simulate the circuit, identify a common issue, and walk through how to diagnose and correct any errors found in a seemingly well-designed debounce circuit. 

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Import Component Footprints Faster with Altium Designer
Import Component Footprints Faster with Altium Designer. Part II: Using an External Library, Internal IPC Compliant Footprint Wizard, and Datasheet-Based Creation

In this video, we will guide you through three distinct manual component import methods; employing an external library, utilizing the internal IPC Compliant Footprint Wizard, or creating one yourself based on documentation.

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Import Component Footprints Faster with Altium Designer
Import Component Footprints Faster with Altium Designer. Part I: Manufacturer Part Search & External Plugin

In this video, we will demonstrate the first two methods of importing components into Altium Designer; through Manufacturer Part Search or by using an external plugin.

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Simulation in Altium Designer
Buck Converter

Learn how to run a transient simulation, analyze the waveforms, and measurement techniques you can use to determine a voltage ripple with a buck converter as an example. 

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How-To's
Edge Plating in RF Design

PCB Edge Plating provides additional noise suppression and improves EMC. In this video we provide you some practical tips for creating metalized PCB edges in Altium Designer.

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Custom Pad Stack in Altium Designer
Custom Paste Mask and Solder Mask

Altium Designer allows you to freely customize paste and solder mask shapes, which allows you to adapt your design for non-standard component footprints.

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Simulation in Altium Designer
Colpitts Oscillator

Learn how to effectively fix errors in circuit simulation and other problem-solving techniques using a Colpitts Oscillator design as an example. 

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Custom Pad Stack in Altium Designer
Custom Thermal Reliefs for Pads

Altium Designer allows you to add, remove, and edit thermal relief spikes anywhere on a pad, regardless of its shape. Using these can improve soldering and prevent manufacturing problems like tombstoning.

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Simulation in Altium Designer
Notch Filter

Learn how to run an AC sweep analysis, execute a Monte Carlo simulation, and interpret the results using a notch filter as an example. 

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Custom Pad Stack in Altium Designer
Custom Pad Shapes

Modern components often contain pads with complex shapes. Altium Designer allows you to create custom pad shapes quickly and easily, and manage them like you would a standard pad.

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