News & Updates
Curious about the intersection of mechanical and electrical design? Both are crucial in the PCB design process, especially for multi-board systems. Read our latest article to learn how ECAD and MCAD can address significant challenges during PCB preparation.
Discover everything you need to know about Altium 365 and experience our suite of applications for secure, seamless, and streamlined collaboration. Visit now to explore how to streamline your electronic product development.
Automated measurements are no longer tough. With our Mixed Simulation mode, everything is easier. Learn more about this feature based on DC-DC buck converter design in this brand new article.
In the dynamic field of electronics design, Altium Designer stands out as a pioneer, continuously advancing the boundaries of PCB (Printed Circuit Board) design. Discover the latest innovations in 3D-MID design, high-speed design, and interactive routing in this new article by David Marrakchi.
Check out our new article explaining how to ensure sufficient pad area for soldering, manage misregistration tolerance, and maintain proper solder dams between components. It also highlights the role of collaboration with fabrication houses and the use of CAD tools in defining land patterns for advanced electronics designs.
We continue our exploration of the Pi.MX8 open-source computer module project. In this new installment, we focus on routing planning and then cover all the layers' routing with all the details you need to know if you want to prepare a similar project.
Check our compilation of essential resources you'll need to use blind and buried vias successfully in an HDI PCB. In our brand new article, we present the main and most valuable information about this technology, which may not be new but is still highly useful in High-Density Interconnect projects.
Discover how Penn Electric Racing builds award-winning, fully electric racecars with Altium 365, pushing the boundaries of technology and design.
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.
If you need to capture sound waves for your electrical device to process, you'll need a microphone. However, microphones these days have become very advanced, and there are so many options to choose from. They range from the relatively simple and popular condenser type microphones to state-of-the-art sound conversion solutions incorporating internal amplifiers and other electronic processing functionality. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the options available.
There are many times where you need an amplifier with high gain, low noise, high slew rate, and broad bandwidth simultaneously. However, not all of these design goals are possible with all off-the-shelf components. Here are some points to consider when working with a composite amplifier design and how to evaluate your design with the right set of circuit simulation tools.
Simple switching regulator circuits that operate in compact spaces, like on a small PCB, can usually be deployed in noisy environments without superimposing significant noise on the output power level. As long as you lay out the board properly, you’ll probably only need a simple filter circuit to remove EMI on the inputs and outputs. As the regulator becomes larger, both physically and electrically, noise problems can become much more apparent, namely radiated EMI and conducted EMI in the PCB layout.
A PCB design review is a practice to review the design of a board for possible errors and issues at various stages of product development. It can range from a formal checklist with official sign-offs to a more free-form inspection of schematic drawings and PCB layouts. For this article, we will not delve into what to check during a design review process but rather look at how a review process itself usually unfolds and how to optimize it to get the most out of your time.
As we established in Part 1, the PCB design review and collaboration practices have room for improvement in many organizations. To address this, we developed Altium 365. Let's examine how running a PCB project through Altium 365 compares to other methods.
If you look on the internet, you'll find some interesting grounding recommendations, and sometimes terminology gets thrown around and applied to a PCB without the proper context or understanding of real electrical behavior. DC recommendations get applied to AC, low current gets applied to high current, and vice versa... the list goes on. One of the more interesting grounding techniques you'll see as a recommendation, including on some popular engineering blogs within the industry, is the use of PCB star grounding.
Every PCB has silkscreen on the surface layer, and you’ll see a range of alphanumeric codes, numbers, markings, and logos on PCB silkscreen. What exactly does it all mean, and what specifically should you include in your silkscreen layer? All designs are different, but there are some common pieces of information that will appear in any silkscreen in order to aid assembly, testing, debug, and traceability
Designing high-speed channels on complex boards requires simulations, measurements on test boards, or both to ensure the design operates as you intend. Gibbs ringing is one of these effects that can occur when calculating a channel’s response using band-limited network parameters. Just as is the case in measurements, Gibbs ringing can occur in channel simulations due to the fact that network parameters are typically band-limited.
In electronics, there is the possibility that your PCB can get pretty hot due to power dissipation in certain components. There are many things to consider when dealing with heat in your board, and it starts with determining power dissipation in your design during schematic capture. If you happen to be operating within safe limits in a high power device, you might need an SMD heat sink on certain components. Ultimately, this could save your components, your product, and even the operator.
One thing is certain: power supply designs can get much more complex than simply routing DC power lines to your components. RF power supply designs require special care to ensure they will function without transferring excessive noise between portions of the system, something that is made more difficult due to the high power levels involved. In addition to careful layout, circuitry needs to be designed such that the system provides highly efficient power conversion and delivery to each subsection of the system.
Overvoltage, overcurrent, and heat are the three most likely events that can destroy our expensive silicon-based components or reduce our product’s life expectancy. The effects are often quite instant, but our product might survive several months of chronic overstress before giving up the ghost in some cases. Without adequate protection, our circuit can be vulnerable to damage, so what should we do? Or do we need to do anything?
Today’s PCB designers and layout engineers often need to put on their simulation hat to learn more about the products they build. When you need to perform simulations, you need models for components, and simulation models often need to be shared with other team members at the project level or component level. What’s the best way for Altium Designer users to share this data? Read this article to learn more about sharing your models with other design participants.
When some designers start talking materials, they probably default to FR4 laminates. The reality is there are many FR4 materials, each with relatively similar structure and a range of material property values. Designs on FR4 are quite different from those encountered at the low GHz range and mmWave frequencies. So what exactly changes at high frequencies, and what makes these materials different? To see just what makes a specific laminate useful as an RF PCB material, take a look at our guide below.
In today’s fast-paced world where iterations of electronics are spun at lightning speeds, we often forget one of the most critical aspects of development: testing. Even if we have that fancy test team, are we really able to utilize them for every modification, every small and insignificant change that we make to our prototypes? In this article, we will review a very low cost, yet highly effective and quite exhaustive test system that will get you that bang for your buck that you’ve been looking for.
If you’ve ever looked at the BOM for a reference design or an open-source project, you may have seen a comment in some of the entries in your BOM. This comment is either “DNP” or “DNI”. If you think about it, every component placed in the PCB requires some level of placement and routing effort, which takes time and money if you’re working for a client. This begs the question, why would anyone design a board with components they don’t plan to include in the final assembly?
When it’s time to share your design data with your manufacturer, it’s like taking a leap of faith. Sending off a complete documentation package might seem as easy as placing your fab files in a zip folder, but there are better ways to ensure your manufacturer understands your project and has access to all your design data. For Altium Designer users, there are multiple options for creating and packaging release data into a complete package for your manufacturers.
We design products not just PCBs requiring effective collaboration between MCAD and ECAD engineers. We need to consider how we can reduce the likelihood of errors when placing critical design components. Component placement in the context of enclosures can be easily handled in an MCAD environment while it is more difficult to achieve in the ECAD domain. Learn how to place components from the MCAD side and synchronize them with Altium Designer ECAD models, designators, and sourcing data to simplify your design process.
Many factors can affect your supply chain. Currently, supply disruptions are being felt due to the effect of the Covid-19 Pandemic. In this webinar, learn how Concord Pro on Altium 365 can mitigate disruptions in your supply chain and help you stay on schedule and budget for your designs.
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 webinar, we’ll review some of the must-have checks before sending your output data for fabrication.
What most people don’t seem to grasp is that every aspect of the PCB is critical. It all plays a significant part in the operation of the final product. The layer stack is no different. We need to keep in mind materials and the intricacies therein, including thickness, weave, dielectric constants, and more. A proper layer stack is needed for each and every design, so it's important to know how to navigate the layer stack manager and all of its features.
Supply shortages have become and continue to be a common problem, especially when it comes to the world of electronics. It's hard to get all the different components for our boards. Heck! It's even tough to get the board themselves too! When electronic components become obsolete or out of stock, design and production can suffer lengthy delays. With current supply chain delays and with an average of 15 end-of-life notices issued every day, obtaining the parts you need is a challenge.
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.
The primary goal of your traces is to carry signals throughout your board without losses. To do this properly, you must familiarize yourself with the requirements for signals on the printed circuit board and how to optimize the topology of the board in terms of signal integrity. We will analyze the most popular routing cases applicable for using the Gloss and Retrace tools in Altium Designer to optimize your signal integrity.
With ever increasing speeds in high-speed data systems comes a couple of PCB layout challenges. High-speed busses like DDR, VME, PCIe just to mention a few can all reach data transfer speeds that require strict timing with very tight tolerances, thereby leaving very little slack in the PCB layout. Watch this on-demand webinar to learn why it's imperative to match track lengths in high-speed data systems and differential signals. You’ll see how to properly define PCB length matching and time delay constraints, and how to effectively route high-speed signals in Altium Designer®.
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.
The primary source of high-speed problems is not due to high clock frequency but rather the fast rise and fall times of component signals. With fast edge rates, reflections may occur at the receiver side, and when the board routing is dense, crosstalk may become a problem. During this webinar, you'll sharpen your knowledge and develop new skills that you can use to design High-Speed PCB's more efficiently and effectively.
The primary source of high-speed problems is not due to high clock frequency but rather the fast rise and fall times of component signals. With fast edge rates, reflections may occur at the receiver side, and when the board routing is dense, crosstalk may become a problem. During this webinar, you'll sharpen your knowledge and develop new skills that you can use to design High-Speed PCB's more efficiently and effectively.
Kinetic Vision, a Cincinnati-based design, engineering, and development firm, is an innovator’s one-stop shop for transforming even the wildest ideas into real products. The company’s design approach keeps everything in-house, including industrial design, mechanical, and electrical design, as well as, engineering, hardware/software development, machine learning, and sometimes even short-run production. Watch this webinar to learn how Kinetic Vision uses the Altium 365 platform to enable a connected and frictionless PCB design experience, increasing their productivity 5 times even
A heavy focus is usually put on managing your design data, but what about managing your design team? A mismanaged design team can lead to a disorganized and inaccurate design library and data. Watch this webinar to see how Altium 365 can help you to organize users into access restricted groups, manage design and designer access rights, avoid design conflicts when multiple members are working on the same design, and standardize your entire project using templates
Working between the Electronic and Mechanical design domains brings unique challenges. ECAD and MCAD tools have different design objectives and have evolved down different paths, and so have the way they store and manage their design and project data. To successfully design these products, the designers must fluidly pass design changes back and forth between the ECAD and MCAD domains beyond outdated file exchanges.
Getting started with design rules can sometimes be a difficult task, but it doesn’t have to be. Altium Designer has added a new design rules user interface along with a new way to define rules, while not compromising past methods. Now, rules and constraints have a design-centric view rather than a rules-centric view which allows for easier visualization and is less prone to error. Watch this video to learn how you can best utilize the improved Rules 2.0 design rule interface.
Working between the Electronic and Mechanical design domains brings unique challenges. ECAD and MCAD tools have different design objectives and have evolved down different paths, and so has the way they store and manage their design and project data. Watch this video to learn about seamless ECAD/MCAD Collaboration on the project, how to comments for other design teams and how to review, Approve or Reject design changes from your mechanical engineer.