News & Updates
Blog
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Recover Conductor Losses By Clearing Your PCB Ground Layer
Controlled impedance routing at high frequencies is difficult enough, and it's important to make sure that you stay within your loss budget on long routes or in lossy media. When you have to route a long trace or a long differential pair to a connector or another component, what can you do if you're reaching the end of your loss budget? In this article, we’ll take a look at the skip reference routing method and explain how it can help recover some loss budget in a lossy interconnect.
On-Demand Webinar
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Mastering The Layer Stack Manager
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.
Blog
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Announcing SOC 2 Type 1 Certification for Altium 365
We are pleased to announce that Altium 365 is officially SOC 2 Type 1 certified. System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 is a widely recognized attestation of security compliance defined by the AICPA and is considered the standard for ensuring data security and operational maturity. A SOC 2 certification provides valuable information for companies to assess the quality of the security provided by a service such as Altium 365.
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Improving Supply Chain Success with BOM Management
It’s no secret that component shortages have become more frequent this year. Companies will continue to grapple with supply chain challenges into 2022 and beyond. The impact of manufacturing delays can be substantial if a part is not available. Delays occur and sales plans get put on hold. It can also be very expensive and risky to replace parts from multiple sources. Fortunately, many shortages can be avoided by introducing proactive supply chain practices.
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Overview of PCB/PCBA Reliability and Failure Analysis
Reliability testing and failure analysis of a PCB/PCBA go hand-in-hand; when designs are stressed to the limit, their failure modes need to be determined through thorough inspection and analysis. To get started on this topic, it’s important to understand the qualification aspects that will govern your bare board design and the PCBA. We’ll look at the various dimensions of PCB/PCBA reliability, as well as some of the standard failure analysis techniques used to identify potential design change requirements.
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When Do PCB Power Plane Resonances Occur?
By now, designers should be aware of some important behavior involved in power delivery to components in a PCB, particularly for digital components. All digital components produce and manipulate wideband signals, where the frequency content theoretically extends up to infinite frequency. As such, some radiation may propagate through your PCB, leading to resonant behavior that is not observed on the power rail.
On-Demand Webinar
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How to Overcome PCB Component Availability Problems
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.
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How to Choose PCB Plating for Your Finished Board
Once your board passes through the standard PCB fabrication process, the bare copper in your PCB will be ready for the application of a surface finish. PCB plating is applied to protect any copper in your PCB that would be exposed through the solder mask, whether it’s a pad, via, or other conductive element. In this article, I’ll run over the different PCB plating material options and their advantages in your PCB.
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What is the PCB Supply Chain?
The PCB supply chain encompasses multiple components, raw materials, and the PCB itself. PCBs and PCB assemblies are often the most technically complex components that are purchased for electronic assemblies and products. The complexity of modern PCBs leads to several challenges for a supply chain management team that may be significantly different when compared with other commodities the team manages. In this brief guide, we'll look in-depth at the PCB supply chain, and specifically what falls within the purview of a procurement and supply chain management team.
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A Guide to Mode Conversion, Its Causes, and Solutions
On interconnects, such as board-to-board connections or cascaded transmission line arrangements, you have an important EMC compliance metric that is sometimes overlooked. This is mode conversion, which can be visualized in an S-parameter measurement for differential and common-mode signal transmission. In this article, we’ll look at a short overview of mode conversion in high-speed design with some examples from common differential standards.
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High-Speed PCB Design Tips
Essential tips for high-speed PCB designs, and when you need to start being concerned about how and where you route your traces.
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MIDs Make a Comeback as Vertical SMD Modules for Your PCB
If you've ever wanted to mount components vertically, but without the expense of a flex section this article is for you. You can use an MID in your PCB.
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Everything You Need to Know about Conformal Coating
Explore the basics of conformal coating with us. Conformal coating is a protective layer applied to electronic circuits to guard against environmental factors such as moisture and dust.
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Introduction to Open Source Laptop Project
We have started a very exciting journey into the creation of an open source laptop project. This project will be an ongoing one, with our community able interactively participate. By utilizing Altium 365 users will be able to view, comment on, and download design files. This will be a great learning experience for new and experienced PCB designers.
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Mechanical and Electrical Design Come Together With Altium’s MCAD CoDesigner
Electronics designers working in small design houses or in large enterprises often encounter a common set of challenges when interfacing with mechanical designers. Continue reading to learn how you can best interface with your mechanical designer to get your projects out the door fast!
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Ebook: Routing High-Density Interconnects with Reliable Microvias
HDI PCBs take a particular approach to routing interconnects through multiple layers to ensure reliability during fabrication, assembly, and operation. The critical structure that enables this is microvias, which are prone to failure if not designed properly. In this e-book, readers will receive an initial look at the reasons microvia reliability has come into the spotlight and why HDI PCB designers put reliability first when routing through microvias.
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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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