News & Updates

If you have a lot of traces intersecting on a single layer, but you need to minimize the amount of vias for your high speed design, you can utilize pin and part swapping. Altium Designer has tools to solve these issues, and we’ll show you how to solve them.

Routing for your high-speed design can be really easy with just a little preparation. We’ll walk you through the best ways to set up your routing so you can easily route your high-speed signals. 

Altium Designer makes it easy to define net classes in both PCB and the schematic. We’ll show you how to define a net class in the schematic for whatever classes you need. 

Learn how to create differential pairs on the schematic side.

Altium Designer gives you fine grained control over how you measure object distances in the PCB. When spacing is such a critical aspect of board layout, this control is absolutely necessary. We'll show you how to utilize the measure distance command and measure selected objects, as well as how to measure tracks and faces of 3D bodies.

In this video, Quantel’s engineers - Jeremie Waller (Senior Electrical Engineer) is using Altium Designer for ECAD and Laine McNeil (Senior Mechanical Engineer) is using Solidworks for MCAD. They are both in an Altium 365 workspace that allows them to closely collaborate while staying in their own familiar design environment.

In this video, you will see how Altium Designer now makes it extremely easy to create curved corners in your designs. Previously, arc-in-corner routing was only supported during interactive routing, but not in Push&Shove mode or during track sliding. The new Push&Shove engine solves this by adding arcs during push and shove and also during track sliding, which is done by switching to any angle corner mode to perform snake routing.

Learn how to effectively use snapping to facilitate routing.

Altium Designer 21 features many powerful tools for creating and editing your rigid-flex board shape. We’ll show you how to use to the board planning mode to create board shape and define regions as well as edit their properties for easy identification and functionality.

Learn how Breville, a consumer electronics company from Australia, was able to speed up its product development process by at least four times with Altium 365. 

How to use the Property Panel in Altium Designer: The properties panel is your information hub for all objects in Altium Designer. Watch this video to learn how to best use the properties dialog in Altium Designer. 

Routes for your design can get messy, leading to inefficiency and waste. Altium Designer’s Glossing features can help! We’ll show you how to clean up your interactive routing as you route, how to gloss tracks already routed, and some tips and tricks to clean them up exactly how you want them.

This video shows how to tent vias in Altium Designer by using design rules. Since vias are often located very close to pads, during assembly, solder paste sometimes flows into vias, which, in turn, leads to poor soldering quality. To avoid this, cover vias with a solder mask layer.

For high-speed projects where there are lines with a given impedance, it is important to maintain a consistent return signal path. For the return signal, reference planes are created in the form of polygons and the polygons must maintain integrity along the entire path of the signal. This video shows how consistent return paths are created and validated. 

Once you’ve pulled your components with an ECO into the PCB you may need to edit them. We’ll show you how to edit your components in the PCB view.

When dealing with high frequency boards, it is necessary to match the timing of certain nets and differential pairs. In this video, we’ll go over how to use the tuning tool to match trace lengths based on the design rules. Using the Interactive Length Tuning command, you will begin tuning and can then use the Properties panel to configure the properites of the tuning segment.