News & Updates

This one area of PCB design can be contentious among some designers as it is related to copper pour, which it is often stated is not needed in most designs. Regardless of your feelings about copper pour, stitching vias have important uses in PCBs at low frequencies and at high frequencies.

The IPC-2221 standard includes many requirements for printed circuit board design and manufacturability, and there are several online calculators that have been developed based on this standard.

When you’re ready to manufacture a new device at production volume, there are many aspects of the product that must come together. The enclosure, cabling and connectors, embedded software/firmware, and of course the PCBA all have to be considered in totality. There is a quick way to get your product into a usable enclosure, complete with input power and cabling, and with a form factor that fits your PCBA. This overused route to a new product is a box build assembly.

It is essential to ask questions and review the design approaches used with your team. Design reviews are essential in the design process, but they can be inconvenient for team members and lack traceability or history. To create the best designs, you need review methods that are as cutting edge as the boards you're making.

Printed circuit board fabricators have become skilled at manufacturing these technologies and also at understanding the reliability and producibility challenges associated with high-density-interconnect technology. Let’s look at where the PCB industry is at today.

What can the industry do to support PCB designers as they continue taking a more active role in product development? Here at Altium, there has been a progressive shift towards looking at the system level and creating tools that get designers more involved throughout the product development process. As the saying goes, over the wall engineering is over… today’s most successful products are built in a collaborative process.

As the 5G rollout progresses and researchers continue to discuss 6G, many new 5G-capable products operating in sub-GHz and mmWave bands are reaching the marketplace. Devices that will include a 5G-compatible front-end, whether small stations/repeaters or handheld devices, use phased arrays as high-gain antenna systems to provide high data throughput without losing range at higher frequencies.

Via protection is an important part of modern PCB design. It provides additional benefits in PCB manufacturing and assembly, increasing the number of acceptable products.

Version control systems (VCS) have been around for a long time in the software world but can be surprisingly new to some folks in the electronics design industry. Version control tools are great for tracking and maintaining entire codebases without the old-school copying, pasting, zipping, and emailing steps many PCB designers use.

Many modern electronics have multiple boards, and connecting those different boards and systems together are harnesses. Learn more about how Altium Designer can help you create harnesses for your own multi-board designs here.

We invite you to explore the causes of output voltage fluctuation. In this article we provide you insights on how to solve and prevent these issues.

In this article we will show you how to create step by step a digital laser range finder for your own. Everything is based on Raspberry Pi board.

Learn how easy it is to create multi-board projects. This practical project article covers the reasons for breaking larger boards into sub-assemblies and explores the various connection options available between sub-assembly boards.

In this article you can learn about light sensors while building an analog solar panel tracking system. This open-source project covers multi-channel design, window comparators, driving motors, and photosensors.

We are continuing our journey through the open-source laptop project. This article explains an initialization of CAD design process from the early concept and brainstorming phase.

In this blog we will show you the strategies to minimize the risk of damage to circuit boards during the initial power-up process.

Essential tips for high-speed PCB designs, and when you need to start being concerned about how and where you route your traces.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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?

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.

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?