News & Updates

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The concept and implementation of differential impedance are both sometimes misunderstood. In addition, the design of a channel to reach a specific differential impedance is often done in a haphazard way. The very concept of differential impedance is something of a mathematical construct that doesn’t fully capture the behavior of each signal in a differential trace. Keep reading to see a bit more depth on how to design to a differential impedance spec and exactly what it means for your design.

The history of engineering, both electrical and mechanical, is littered with approximations that have fallen by the wayside. These approximations worked well for a time and helped advance technology significantly over the decades. However, any model has limits on its applicability, and the typical RLCG transmission line model and frequency-independent impedance equations are no different. Copper foil roughness modeling and related transmission line impedance simulations are just one of many areas in which standard models cannot correctly treat signal behavior.

Once you’re planning for production of any new board, you’ll likely be planning a battery of tests for your new product. These tests often focus on functionality and, for high speed/high frequency boards, signal/power integrity. However, you may intend for your product to operate for an extreme period of time, and you’ll need some data to reliably place a lower limit on your product’s lifetime. In addition to in-circuit tests, functional tests, and possibly mechanical tests, the components and boards themselves can benefit from burn-in testing.

If you remember your days in school, then you probably remember the feeling of happiness and celebration when you pass a big exam. You’ll feel the same sense of adulation when your board spin passes a barrage of pre and post assembly tests, but a complex design might not reach that stage unless you implement the right design for testability methods. There are some simple steps that can help your manufacturer identify and quickly implement important bare-board and in-circuit testing (ICT), especially on critical circuit blocks.

This article describes the best hints and tips for designers of rigid-flex circuits. These tips include choosing the most appropriate material, suggestions for coordinating the PCB with the manufacturer, and a set of rules to be followed while PCB design.

There are a number of factors at play when it comes to the impact of inductance on high-frequency power distribution systems. This article will focus on the inductance of the capacitor footprint along with the inductance of vias from the capacitor footprint to the PCB power planes. Included are the various types and sizes of footprints for ceramic capacitors as well as a footprint for a tantalum capacitor; how changing the footprint impacts inductance and test results obtained for different capacitors.

In order to properly suppress common-mode noise, differential pairs must be routed in parallel, with perfect symmetry, and with matched lengths. In real PCBs, meeting these three objectives isn’t always possible. Instead of eyeing out your different pair lengths, the interactive routing tools in Altium Designer make differential pair length matching easy. You can encode permissible length mismatches as design rules as part of controlled impedance routing, or you can manually perform differential pair tuning using a variety of meandering styles. Here’s how this works in Altium Designer.

Augmented reality, virtual surgery, limb replacements, medical devices, and other new technologies need to incorporate haptic vibration motors and feedback to give the wearer a full sense of how they are interacting with their environment. Unless these cutting-edge applications include haptic vibration and feedback, users are forced to rely on their other four senses to understand the real or virtual environment.

Over the last 20 years, electronic devices have become increasingly sophisticated. Less than two decades ago, just having a mobile phone to make calls was rare; today, our phones power our lives. To meet the growing demand for smartphone technology, technology has become faster, more functional, and intuitive. Improvements to the component base have streamlined processes while reducing manufacturing costs.

Going deeper into crosstalk, there is always the issue of verifying EMI/EMC compliance through test and measurement. With the multitude of signal integrity problems that can arise in real PCBs, how can the astute designer distinguish them all? Some problems are clearer than others, with specific signal integrity measurements being developed for testing and measuring particular aspects of signal behavior. The fact is, multiple signal integrity problems could be present on a single interconnect simultaneously.

Once you’ve finished your new project and you’re ready to push it to your manufacturer, you’ll normally be stuck in an endless email chain with an engineer, or you’ll have to share cloud links with each other. The cloud sharing and design release tools in Altium Designer and Altium Concord Pro are a huge help in this area. In this post, I’m going to take an existing project I’ve worked with in a number of recent blogs, create some fabrication and assembly documentation, and finally push this data to a manufacturer using Altium Concord Pro.

To this day, I still see many PCB layout “rules of thumb” that first became common nearly 20 years ago. Do these rules still universally apply? The answer is a firm “maybe.” The discussion around PCB layout rules of thumb is not that these rules are correct or incorrect. The problem is that the discussion around these rules often lacks context, leading to the always/never type of discussion seen in some popular forums. My goal in this article is to communicate the context behind the common PCB design rules.

As the operating speed of components has increased, controlled impedance is becoming more common in digital, analog, and mixed-signal systems. If the controlled impedance value for an interconnect is incorrect, it can be very difficult to identify this problem during an in-circuit test. However, testing is normally performed on a PCB test coupon, which is manufactured on the same panel as the PCB. If you want to get through board spins quickly and aid future designs, you might consider designing a test coupon and keeping it handy for future designs.

Altium’s DbLib support is one of the oldest and most loved features of Altium Designer for managing electronic components and their data. They’ve been present in the software world since before I could fathom the existence of Ohm’s law. Altium 20.1’s new Component Sync feature allows you to synchronize virtually any database or database Library with Altium 365, taking advantage of both approaches strengths.

If you’ve created your next great schematic, there is a lot going on behind the scenes in your design software. A schematic netlist is one of the central pieces of information that will be used in multiple features in your design software to create a real PCB. Your schematic netlist provides both electrical connectivity information, and reflects the functional structure of your design data in a single set of data.

An SMPS is one of those quiet (yet electrically noisy) devices that makes your favorite electronics run smoothly. Among the numerous DC-DC converter topologies, a buck converter finds plenty of uses for stepping down the input voltage to a lower level while providing high efficiency power conversion. A common question around component selection for these power converters is how to select an inductor for a buck converter. The goal in working with an inductor and other components in a buck converter is to limit power loss to heat and while minimizing current ripple.

GPS-capable devices range from your phone to your smartwatch; simply type in your destination and follow the directions. Simple, right? According to the Washington Post, we should all stop using GPS as it’s ruining the navigation centers of our brains. Despite the neurological effects on perception and judgment, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) aims to find alternatives to GPS to provide redundancy.