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PCB Design Basics for New Designers
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PCB Design Basics for New Designers

In this article, I’ll present some design basics that every new designer should follow to help ensure their design process is successful. Some of these points may challenge the conventional view of how circuit boards are constructed, but they are intended to help balance low noise signaling, manufacturability, and ease of solving a layout.

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Efficient PCB Routing Using Gloss and Retrace Tools

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.

Selecting Materials for High Voltage PCB Design and Layout
Blog
Selecting Materials for High Voltage PCB Design and Layout

High voltage PCBs are subject to certain safety and reliability concerns that you won’t find in most other boards. If your fabrication house specializes in high voltage PCBs and keeps materials in stock, they can likely recommend a material set, as well as a standard stackup you might use for certain voltage ranges and frequencies. If you need to choose your own materials, follow the tips below to help you narrow down to the right material set.

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Working with MCAD CoDesigner extension
Shaping the PCB in MCAD

Through the MCAD Co-designer in Altium Designer, you can collaborate with a mechanical engineer to shape the PCB in your MCAD tool and keep it updated in Altium Designer. We’ll show you how in Altium Designer and in your MCAD tool.

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How to work with Selection
Cross Select Mode

Cross Select Mode is a unique tool that allows for cross-selection of objects between the schematic and PCB thanks to the Altium Unified platform. This makes it easy to look for specific components, as well as take advantage of component placement tools.

Via tenting in PCB Layout
Blog
When to Use Tented Vias in Your PCB Layout

There are some guidelines I see many designers implement as a standard practice, often without thinking about it. Some of these practices are misunderstood or implemented without best practices. Others are implemented without thinking about the potential problems. One of these is the use of tented vias, which is sometimes implemented in a PCB layout by default. Is this always the right practice?

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How to work with Selection
Tools for Efficient Selection

Efficient selection tools can make a difference in how long and how clean your design can be. Learn how to utilize the Edit Select Menu tools in Altium Designer to take control over your layout.

Capacitive load termination
Blog
How to Impedance Match and Terminate Capacitive Loads

The idea of a purely capacitive load is something of a fallacy. Yes, capacitors exist, but all capacitors are non-ideal, and it is this deviation from a theoretical capacitance that determines how to impedance match a load that exhibits capacitive behavior. Let’s take a look at this important aspect of interconnect design and see what it really means to terminate a capacitive load.

Embedded thumbnail for Tools for Easily Selecting Objects in the PCB
How to work with Selection
Tools for Easily Selecting Objects in the PCB

Explore more than basic mouse movements by taking a look at the tools that Altium Designer has to offer for making selecting and moving objects in the PCB an easy task. This will increase your productivity and allow you to spend more time designing

Using Altium 365 Over Your Vanilla Version Control System
Blog
Using Altium 365 Over Your Vanilla Version Control System

There are all sorts of version control systems out there that people have been using with their PCB design software. As discussed in Why Use a Version Control System, we looked at different options ranging for local hard drive storage to sophisticated online revisioning systems. In this article we will be reviewing the differences between a standard VCS and Altium 365.

Why Use a Version Control System in PCB Design
Blog
Why Use a Version Control System in PCB Design

Version Control Systems (VCS) have been around for many decades within the software world but can be surprisingly new to some folks in the electronics design industry. This article will cover what a VCS is, what it does, and why you should be using one for your PCB design projects.

IPC 6012 Class 3 Annular Ring
Blog
Meeting Standards: IPC 6012 Class 3 Annular Ring

Designers often conflate leftover annular ring and pad sizes - they need to place a sufficiently large pad size on the surface layer to ensure that the annular ring that is leftover during fabrication will be large enough. As long as the annular ring is sufficiently large, the drill hit will not be considered defective and the board will have passed inspection. In this article, I'll discuss the limits on IPC-6012 Class 3 annular rings as these are a standard fabrication requirement for high-reliability rigid PCBs.

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Working with Polygons
How to Work with The Polygon Manager

It is important to have a high-level view of all polygons on the PCB design. The Polygon Manager lets you rename polygons, set their pour order, perform re-pouring or disable pouring on selected polygons, add/scope the polygon connection style and clearance design rules, and add polygon classes for selected polygons.

PCB fabrication notes
Blog
Decoding PCB Fabrication Notes

Sending a board out for fabrication is an exciting and nerve-wracking moment. Why not just give your fabricator your design files and let them figure it out? There are a few reasons for this, but it means the responsibility comes back to you as the designer to produce manufacturing files and documentation for your PCB. It’s actually quite simple if you have the right design tools. We’ll look at how you can do this inside your PCB layout and how this will help you quickly generate data for your manufacturer.

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How to Work with Differential Pairs
Assigning Impedance Profiles for Differential Pairs

When you assign an impedance profile to a differential pair you open up several options for control over your routes. We'll show you how to do just that, as well as how to fix errors that may pop up and how to create classes for differential pairs based on assigned impedance profiles.

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How-To's
How to Highlight or Select Net Connections in the PCB

We’ll show you how to highlight net selections so you can easily track where connections are made. We’ll show you how to hide and show nets, and how to use the view configuration and PCB panels to view and highlight nets across your design, and how to assign net colors in both the PCB and the schematic.

HDI PCB design and HDI PCB manufacturing process
Blog
Design Basics for HDI and the HDI PCB Manufacturing Process

As the world of technology has evolved, so has the need to pack more capabilities into smaller packages. PCBs designed using high-density interconnect techniques tend to be smaller as more components are packed in a smaller space. An HDI PCB uses blind, buried, and micro vias, vias in pads, and very thin traces to pack more components into a smaller area. We’ll show you the design basics for HDI and how Altium Designer® can help you create a powerful HDI PCB.

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How to Design a BGA
Remove Unused Via Pads

The Remove Unused Pad Shapes tool in Altium Designer gives you control over the via pads in your design. We’ll show you how to use it to increase the usable area of power and ground polygons, increase the density of conductors between hole rows, and fixing incorrect connections.

All About PCB Test Points
Blog
Is It Printed or a Component? All About PCB Test Points

Test points in your electronic assembly will give you a location to access components and take important measurements to verify functionality. If you’ve never used a test point or you’re not sure if you need test points, keep reading to see what options you have for test point usage in your PCB layout.

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How to Design a BGA
Tent Vias under BGA

When via are located close to component pads some soldering issues can arise, but this can be fixed with Tented vias. We’ll show you how to manually tent vias and how to tent vias through the Design Rules.

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Man beside electrical schematic
Blog
How to Choose the Best PCB Manufacturer for Your Project

PCB manufacturing is competitive, and there is plenty of worldwide manufacturing capacity for new boards. If you’re looking for a manufacturer for your next project, it can be difficult to determine who is the best option to produce your board. Different fabricators and assemblers offer different levels of service, different capabilities, and access to different processes and materials. There are a lot of options to consider when selecting a manufacturer for your project.

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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Blog
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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Blog
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.

Blog
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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Blog
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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Blog
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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Blog
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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Blog
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.

Blog
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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Embedded thumbnail for LSM: Impedance profile
How-To's
LSM: Impedance profile

Creating Impedance profiles for transmission lines and how to apply them to the board

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How-To's
Multichannel Schematic: Creating Channels

Altium Designer makes creating single and multichannel designs effective and quick. We’ll show you how to create and annotate output and input channels in your design.

Embedded thumbnail for How to efficiently use Blankets?
How-To's
How to efficiently use Blankets?

Blanket is a powerful tool for group assignment of properties in schematic documents. It makes it easier and faster to assign circuit classes, differential pairs, and design rules within schematic documents. This video provides instructions on how to use blanket to simplify work in your designs.

Embedded thumbnail for High Speed: XSignals for DDR3/DDR4
How-To's
High Speed: XSignals for DDR3/DDR4

In high speed design DDR3 and DDR4 memory chips can utilize xSignal classes to match track lengths from the controller to the memory chip easily and quickly. We’ll show you how using the xSignals wizard.

Embedded thumbnail for Design RF PCB: routing (any angle, arc)
How-To's
Design RF PCB: routing (any angle, arc)

It is worth taking a responsible approach to the shape and size of the RF signal conductors. In this video we will cover some practical aspects of working with routing such nets in Altium Designer.

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How-To's
Draftsman Document: Snapping

Snapping using the grids and snapping tools in Altium Designer’s Draftsman Editor gives you a lot of control over how you create and annotate primitives and components. We’ll show you how easy it is to use snapping in the Drafstman Editor.

Further Enhancements to Sheet Cross-referencing
What's New in 22.3
原理图输入改进

您可以通过向项目添加交叉引用,轻松跟踪项目中原理图图纸之间的网络连接流。

Further Enhancements to Sheet Cross-referencing
What's New in 22.3
Schematic Capture Improvement

Adding cross-references to the project allows you to easily follow the connective flow of nets between the schematic sheets in a project. 

Embedded thumbnail for High Speed: XSignals
How-To's
High Speed: XSignals

You can create, configure, and utilize xSignals in Altium Designer to make your design process more efficient and effective. We’ll show you how to do it manually, using the more comprehensive Create xSignals command, and using the xSignal wizard.

Embedded thumbnail for DFM and fab cost/time constraints: What is annular ring and how to configure it
How-To's
DFM and fab cost/time constraints: What is annular ring and how to configure it

The minimum dimension from the wall of the aperture to the edge of the pad is called an annular ring, and we can configure it with Altium Designer. We’ll show you how to get started and manage the annular ring in your design rules.

Embedded thumbnail for Altium 365 Getting Started: Gerber Compare
How-To's
Altium 365 Getting Started: Gerber Compare

The task of comparing different versions of manufacturing files usually arises when the electrical engineer needs to check and confirm the manufacturer's edits or clarify details of changes before starting production. In Altium 365 you can perform an automatic comparison of Gerber files.

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Working with Polygons
Polygon Pours

Polygon pours are used to create copper geometries on your board. You can prioritize polygon pour order, hide them to make it easier to work on your board, and repour them to resolve design rule conflicts.

Embedded thumbnail for How to Use the MCAD CoDesigner?
How-To's
How to Use the MCAD CoDesigner?

This video shows how the ECAD and MCAD engineers now can communicate directly while staying within their own design environment. The MCAD engineer is able to push design information directly from their design software straight into Altium Designer. Any changes can be reviewed, accepted, or denied by the receiving party. This process of pushing and reviewing design changes is bi-directional, meaning that both the MCAD or ECAD engineer can push and review changes to the other. 

Embedded thumbnail for Creating Additional Snap Points Using a 3D Model
How to use Snapping
Creating Additional Snap Points Using a 3D Model

Demonstration of using snap points with 3D models and how they can assist in the placement of said models.

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Working with Polygons
Polygon Connect Styles

Define how vias and pads connect to polygons with a design rule. Customize the thermal relief width, number, and rotation as well as the air gap width.

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How to Work with Classes
How to work with Component Classes?

Modern printed circuit boards can contain a large number of components, which makes them difficult to work with. In this video we will show what component classes can be on a PCB, how to create custom component classes and how they can be useful for us. 

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