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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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Blog
US Department of Transportation Seeking Alternatives to GPS

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.

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Bluetooth 5.1 SoC vs. Module: Which is Best for Your Design?

The list of features available in Bluetooth just got a little longer since the release of Bluetooth 5.1. If you want to incorporate a Bluetooth 5.1 SoC into your new product, you have two primary options for bringing this component into your board. The first is as an SoC that mounts to your board just like any other component. The other option is to bring a module into your new board—directly onto the surface layer. Here’s what you need to know about a Bluetooth 5.1 SoC or module in your next IoT product.

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Blog
USB Power Delivery for Your Next Project

Since its introduction in the late 90s, the USB standard has never ceased to grow in popularity. There has been a growing trend toward USB being a power delivery interface with data, rather than a data interface that can supply power, as the 1.0 specification originally intended. To supply the increasing thirst for power over USB, the USB 3.0 Spec with Type-C began implementing the Power Delivery standard, which you should consider using for your next electronics project.

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Blog
Circuit Board Design for In-Circuit Testing

There are many types of circuit board tests available in electronics manufacturing today, each having unique goals and characteristics. This article presents guidelines at the design level (schematic and layout) to enable the use of in-circuit testing (ICT) fixtures to verify proper component assembly. These simple test fixtures allow your board to be tested as its assembled, which helps identify and remove failed boards from your production run.

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Blog
Planning for the Future with Cirris Systems and Altium

Technological advancements have been a hallmark of the past few decades, from the widespread adoption of internet technology to the smartphones and wireless devices we rely on every day to stay connected. Orlan Thatcher, Board Layout Specialist at Cirris Systems, could never have predicted the demand their services would generate. The company struggled with six different software platforms before switching to Altium Designer.

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Blog
An Introduction to NFC

I used to work in a research lab that worked primarily with RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) and NFC (Near Field Communication) technology, particularly for the agriculture industry and cattle identification. These were very specialized fields; however, the lab also worked on projects which involved retail and various other applications for NFC. It’s an amazing technology that you might be using every day without thinking about it - building access to your mobile phone payments, for instance. 

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Editing Your PCB Geometry with MCAD Tools

You need to define your PCB geometry in the context of your enclosure. If your board cannot physically be assembled into the final product, it doesn't matter how well laid out it is electrically. This webinar focuses on how the MCAD CoDesigner allows you to edit your PCB in the context of a higher-level assembly, allowing you to respect the relevant mechanical constraints.

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The PCB Fabrication Process — what Every Design Engineer Needs To Know, Part 2

In Part 1 of this article, I described the first steps that occur during the PCB fabrication process. They detailed the inner layer processing effort as well as the efforts that take place during the transition from inner layer processing to lamination. This part of the article will provide a detailed description of the lamination, drilling and plating processes.

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The PCB Fabrication Process—What Every Design Engineer Needs To Know, Part 1

There are still a number of designers - perhaps most of them - who have never toured a PCB fabrication facility. They are also unaware of the various steps that occur during the fabrication process. The purpose of this article is to describe those steps and what transpires in each of them. Part 1 of this article focuses on inner layer processing and the steps that are done prior the lamination process.

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Webinar "8 Reasons to Store Your Components in Altium 365"

Working with local libraries seems like a simple solution, but we often don’t take into account the added time spent maintaining libraries and sharing them between team members. This webinar showcases the advantages of component storage in Аltium 365 to resolve the issues of local libraries and component management.

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Bridging the Gap Between Designers and Customers

Every piece of electronic equipment starts with a great idea. Transforming great ideas into real, physical products takes a team of talented individuals and multiple companies coming together to make everything from the internal components to the external hardware. Paul Payen de la Garanderie, Founder and Owner of AW Audio, an engineering services company based in France, understands these challenges very well. With an extensive background in the Audio/Visual industry, Paul has had to work with multiple companies over the years, from small start-ups to celebrated AV firms.

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Additive PCB Manufacturing: The Vaccine for Electronics Supply Shocks?

At this time, at least a quarter of the world’s population is under quarantine, with workers unable to go to offices or factories, leading to fundamental disabling of the world economy. The electronics industry is suffering greatly as well, dealing with a supply shock from factories shutting down in Southeast Asia, to demand-side shocks from Western markets literally shutting down. Now it is the electrical engineers taking the lead with additive PCB manufacturing.

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Webinar "6 Steps to Master Project Storage"

Altium 365 provides a secure cloud platform to store all of your design files in a single place so you can share them with anyone and access them from anywhere. This webinar discusses the advantages of placing, storing, and working with projects in Altium 365.

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Altium Designer 20 Changed My Layout Design Routines

I just finalized my first PCB design using Altium Designer 20. At the same time, I tested some new AD20 features, and in this article, I’ll share my thoughts about new layout design features which made the biggest impression for me: sliding, and any-angle routing.

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Blog
Designing for Antenna Isolation in Your Wireless System

Anyone who has taken apart an old cell phone or designs IoT devices knows multiple communication capabilities are present in these designs, each requiring different antennas. The RF designer should already take precautions for interconnect isolation, but antenna isolation is just as important when modeling and designing wireless systems.

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Wearable Design Project
Wearable Design Project - Connectivity and Control

Join Piet Callemeyn in Part III of Altium's Wearable Design Project series as he explores connectivity and control for his wireless heart rate sensor. Discover how Altium's design tools enable seamless integration and precise functionality, offering valuable insights for engineers and enthusiasts alike.

Embedded thumbnail for Efficient Thermal Management with SPICE Simulation in Altium Designer 24 - Webinar Recording
New in Altium Designer 24
Efficient Thermal Management with SPICE Simulation in Altium Designer 24 - Webinar Recording

Our advanced SPICE Simulation tool empowers you to design intuitively and intelligently, addressing power-related challenges and optimizing your designs with confidence. Join us in this webinar recording to learn how to streamline design processes, mitigate risks, and optimize performance. Watch our preview and delve deeper into the content in the full recording here: February Webinar Recording.

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New in Altium Designer 24
PCB Section View: Use Cases

Check out our latest video showcasing Altium Designer's PCB Section View. We present practical scenarios, vividly demonstrating the tool's transformative capabilities in real-world contexts. Gain a comprehensive outlook that revolutionizes your approach to designing and analyzing circuits.

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Octopart
Mastering Octopart - Get to Know Octopart.com Webinar Recording

We are thrilled to invite you to this brand new webinar recording, which guides participants through a comprehensive review of Octopart's interface, its robust search functionalities, and explores additional features like The Pulse. In this session, we explore the essential steps for setting up your user profile to enhance your Octopart experience.

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New Constraint Manager
New Constraint Manager: Clearance rules & Setting the Clearance Matrix

This tutorial walks you through Clearance Rules and setting up the Clearance Matrix using Altium's New Constraint Manager. Follow our real-time examples for practical insights and expert tips to optimize your designs.

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Wearable Design Project
Wearable Design Project - Sensing

Piet Callemeyn is back on his wireless heart rate sensor. Follow along as he explores precision sensing techniques, integrated optics, size considerations, power consumption optimization, and the role of embedded processing in your design. Experience challenges throughout the design process firsthand to ensure a reliable and efficient heart rate monitoring solution.

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New Constraint Manager
New Constraint Manager: Introduction & Creation of Net Classes

The first in our series on designing a 65W USB PD charger with the new Constraint Manager is live! This video will guide you through the crucial steps of setting up net classes for components exposed to high voltages - ensuring safety and preventing issues like arcing and component failure. Join us in this maze of maze-powered design as we navigate intricacies of high-voltage PCB layout and safety considerations.

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How-To's
Tesla Unveiled! EE Deep Dives Into Roadster's PCB Design Files

Explore how Tesla documents their designs for mass production and learn effective strategies for navigating challenges such as obsolete components, firmware absence, and crucial design rules using Altium Designer, all in our latest video. Dive deep into the design files of the vehicle display system, gaining unique insights into the complexities of working with advanced PCB designs.

Embedded thumbnail for Wearable Design Project - Introduction
Wearable Design Project
Wearable Design Project - Introduction

Ever wanted to design a wearable electronic device? Follow along with Piet Callemeyn as he delves into the design of a wireless heart rate sensor. In this series, Piet explores PCB design essentials to create a variable heart rate sensor, offering insights around efficient power use, seamless data transfer, and a clean, compact design throughout the entire process.

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New in Altium Designer 24
Coming Soon: Simulation S-parameters Analysis

Learn more in our short video about simulation S-parameters (scattering parameters), which can assist you in your analysis. This data can be used to optimize your design, leading to cost savings, improved product quality, and a competitive edge in the marketplace.

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New in Altium Designer 24
Coming Soon: Footprint Mirroring Prevention

Check out the new feature that we are preparing for you. Footprint Mirroring Prevention adds measures to prevent inadvertent mirroring of a footprint along its X/Y axes. With this functionality, you can avoid costly board respins.

Embedded thumbnail for Design in a New Dimension: Altium Designer’s 3D-MID Demo
New in Altium Designer 24
Design in a New Dimension: Altium Designer’s 3D-MID Demo

Explore the cutting-edge 3D-MID capabilities in Altium Designer with our detailed demo! In this video, we guide you through the process of creating a 3D PCB document, importing components, and seamlessly transitioning from 2D to 3D board design.

Embedded thumbnail for PCB CoDesign Demo: A Collaborative Approach to PCB Design
New in Altium Designer 24
PCB CoDesign Demo: A Collaborative Approach to PCB Design

Explore the realm of collaborative design through our PCB CoDesign feature. Discover how multiple engineers can seamlessly collaborate on the same project in our full-time demo. Design faster together with Altium Designer 24.

Embedded thumbnail for Empowering Faster Electronics Development with Altium Designer 24 - Webinar Recording
New in Altium Designer 24
Empowering Faster Electronics Development with Altium Designer 24 - Webinar Recording

If you missed our Altium Designer 24 webinar, don't worry! We have good news for you—it was recorded. Explore the game-changing features that will revolutionize your PCB design experience and discover the new standard in electronic design.

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New in Altium Designer 24
Streamline Your Design Process with PCB Layout Replication

We are delighted to invite you to explore our latest demo showcasing a powerful feature - PCB Layout Replication. Discover the capabilities of this tool and see how it can enhance your project workflow by automating the replication of components and repetitive sections in a PCB layout.

Embedded thumbnail for A True 3D Mechatronic Integrated Device Design in Altium Designer
New in Altium Designer 24
A True 3D Mechatronic Integrated Device Design in Altium Designer

The 3D layout tool for Mechatronic Integrated Device (MID) designs seamlessly merges electronic and mechanical elements, unlocking possibilities in diverse fields such as wearables, medical devices, and automotive components. To delve deeper into this innovative tool, watch our brand-new short video.

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