Welcome, Guest

Sign in to learn, create, and do more with the product you love.

News & Updates

Filters:
Tag
Embedded thumbnail for Design Review Use Case
Discovering Altium 365
Design Review Use Case

Design reviews are critical to being successful. Capture design discussions through contextual commenting in the web browser or in Altium Designer to ensure feedback is recorded and actioned effectively.

Article preview
Blog
Modeling Copper Foil Roughness in Altium Designer's Impedance Profiler

With the new layer stack manager in Altium Designer®, you can now include copper foil roughness factors directly in your impedance calculator. This is quite easy to do in the layer stack manager, but it begs the question: what exactly is the copper roughness factor? Which value should be used for your interconnects?

Embedded thumbnail for Resolving Errors in the PCB
Resolving Errors in the PCB

We’ve looked at how to set up the Design Rule Checker to help us analyze our PCB design errors. Now it’s time to resolve these errors and prep our design to start generating output files.

Article preview
Blog
High-Speed Signal Routing: The 5 Important Constraints

After you capture your schematic as an initial layout and create an initial component arrangement, it’s time to define your routing constraints. Doing this early will allow your DRC engine to spot rules violations before you finish your layout. Likewise, you’ll be able to modify the default rule set to meet your layout requirements. Here are the important routing constraints you’ll need to check before you start routing your board.

Blog
How to Create a PCB Manufacturing Cost Estimation

Some manufacturers have very convenient PCB manufacturing cost estimation calculators you can use, but the real costs depend on a number of factors. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re producing your own boards, or you are managing manufacturing, testing, and delivery for a new project, it’s your job to help clients understand the primary cost drivers for new boards. Here’s how you can get an estimate of your fabrication costs, both for local and overseas manufacturers.

Embedded thumbnail for Defining the Layer Stackup
Defining the Layer Stackup

The PCB is designed and formed as a stack of layers and the definition of the PCB layer stack is a critical element of successful printed circuit board design. In Altium Designer, the Layer Stack Manager is used to develop the printed circuit board internal design including layer-pairing, careful via design, any back drilling requirements, rigid/flex requirements, copper balancing, layer stack symmetry, and material compliance. This video guides you through creation of a layer stackup, adding the necessary layers, as well as adding an impedance profile.

Blog
PCB Mountable Connectors: SMD vs. Through-hole

Selecting a connector is as much an art as it is a science. The artistic side is all about aesthetics and satisfying clearances, while the scientific side is all about signal integrity. For PCB mountable connectors, you’ll need to choose between surface-mounted or through-hole connectors, and you’ll need to consider how each type affects signal integrity in your application. Here’s what you need to think about beyond the standard connector specifications.

Article preview
Blog
PCB Via Current-Carrying Capacity: How Hot is Too Hot?

Trace and via current-carrying capacity are legitimate design points to focus on when designing a new board that will carry high current. The goal is to keep conductor temperatures below some appropriate limit, which then helps keep components on the board cool.

Blog
How to Maximize Copper in Your PCB Design: The Pros and Cons of Copper Pouring Versus Placing

There is a saying in copper pour PCB design, “Copper is free.” It means a PCB editor designer must think in reverse. A board starts off as solid copper, and the copper you don’t want is removed. It is faster to build, less consumptive, and less expensive to make a board that is mostly copper as compared to the same size board that is mostly bare. Picking the correct technique will make the difference between an effortless or frustrating experience.

Embedded thumbnail for Searching for Errors in Schematic
Searching for Errors in Schematic

Searching for Errors: Errors and mistakes happen to everyone - from beginners to professionals. So we always preach how it is paramount for your design to be validated before pushing it to the PCB. But luckily it’s pretty easy to find and analyze any errors using Altium Designer. We’ll take a look at how to find and analyze errors in your schematic.

Embedded thumbnail for Creating Net Classes
Juni 2, 2020
Creating Net Classes

A Net Class is a collection of nets that can be used for creating a targeted design rule. So for example, you may want all power and ground nets to have a minimum track width to handle a specific current rating. So we’ll show you how to assign these nets to a NetClass. 

Article preview
Blog Mai 14, 2020
How to Highlight Nets in Altium Designer to Simplify Schematic and PCB Designs

Highlighting nets will help you simplify your schematic and PCB design. In Altium , there are multiple options that enable you to leverage this capability to simplify the verification of connections and circuit paths and make sure that the design you send to your manufacturer accurately reflects the printed circuit board you need built.

Embedded thumbnail for How to Transfer Libraries to Concord Pro
New in Altium Designer 20 Mai 6, 2020
How to Transfer Libraries to Concord Pro

This video demonstrates how the Library Migrator can quickly move database and integrated libraries to the Concord Pro workspace. Your design can be organized and verified in the Library Migrator before pushing it to the cloud. After migration, the Messages panel will display any missing information.

Routed tracks
Blog Mai 5, 2020
Helpful Tips for Interactive Routing in Altium Designer

Before you jump into the software, you should know the types of things you’re going to want to look out for. Traces, connection lines, differential pair routing, and route paths can all affect the routing process of your board. Make sure that you’re equipped knowing, ultimately, what you want your board design to accomplish and furthermore, where you anticipate potential problem areas to be.

Embedded thumbnail for Improved Impedance Calculator
New in Altium Designer 20 Apr. 29, 2020
Improved Impedance Calculator

The impedance calculator in the Layer Stack Manager now supports single and differential coplanar structures. This video shows how the impedance calculator has been improved with new coplanar transmission line structures, greater control over the dimensional properties of the physical structure, and modeling of Conductor Surface Roughness using Surface Roughness and Roughness Factor values. 

Tag
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.

How to Design to a Differential Impedance Specification
Blog
How to Design to a Differential Impedance Specification

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.

Product Lifecycle Management in Electronics Manufacturing
Blog
Product Lifecycle Management in Electronics Manufacturing

An effective product lifecycle management (PLM) solution will integrate the tools and processes employed to design, develop and manufacture a new device. This solution goes beyond engineering activities to include the project management, process control, and financial management of the end-to-end business processes. PLM solutions create this collaborative environment where product development can flourish, bringing additional benefits in efficiencies and transparent communications, breaking silos, and speeding up the development process.

Tight versus loose coupling
Blog
Should You Use Tight vs. Loose Differential Pair Spacing and Coupling?

In this article, we want to get closer to a realistic description of tight coupling vs. loose coupling in terms of differential pair spacing, as well as how the differential pair spacing affects things like impedance, differential-mode noise, reception of common-mode noise, and termination. As we’ll see, the focus on tight coupling has its merits, but it’s often cited as necessary for the wrong reasons.

Engineering Design Review Guide
Blog
How to Solve Your Engineering Design Review Challenges

You’ve possibly gone through plenty of engineering design reviews, both on the front-end of a project and the back-end before manufacturing. Engineering design reviews are performed to accomplish multiple objectives, and with many engineering teams taking a systems-based approach to design and production, electronics design teams will need to review much more than just a PCB layout and BOM. Today’s challenges with sourcing, manufacturability, reliability, and mechanical constraints are all areas that must be confronted in real designs

Schematic Review Checklist
Blog
Schematic Review Checklist

One of the most common points of failure of a device occurs even before you start to layout your circuit board. Mistakes in your schematic design can easily make their way all the way into prototypes or production without a second thought once layout starts. In this article, I’m not going to extol the virtues of a good schematic design. Instead, this article is a simple no frills checklist.

Via current carrying capacity for PCBs
Blog
PCB Via Current-Carrying Capacity: How Hot is Too Hot?

One common question from designers is current-carrying capacity of conductors in a PCB. Trace and via current-carrying capacity are legitimate design points to focus on when designing a new board that will carry high current. The goal is to keep conductor temperatures below some appropriate limit, which then helps keep components on the board cool. Let’s dig into the current state of thermal demands on vias in PCBs and how they compare to internal and external PCB traces.

PCB Shield
Blog
Phalanx, not Failure: PCB Shielding to Protect Your Design

A combination of good printed circuit board design and good shielding mitigates EMI. Good PCB design for EMI shielding revolves around the layout, the placement of filters, and ground planes. A well-designed PCB minimizes parasitic capacitance and ground loops. Keep reading to learn more about PCB shielding.

Man working in Altium Designer
Blog
Best Practices in Hardware Version Control Systems

Any project can get very complex, and the PCB design team needs to track revisions throughout a project. Why worry about tracking revisions? In the event you ever receive changes to product functional requirements, major changes are made to your product’s architecture, or you’re ready to finalize the design and prepare for fabrication, it’s best to clone a project at its current state and begin working on a new version. Keeping track of all these design changes in a PCB design project takes the type of hardware version control tools you’ll find in Altium 365™.

Copper pour and via stitching
Blog
Copper Pour and Via Stitching: Do You Need Them in a PCB Layout?

To pour or not to pour, to stitch or not to stitch… Over many years, some common “rules of thumb” have become very popular and, ultimately, taken a bit out of context. Rules of thumb are not always wrong, but taking PCB design recommendations out of context helps justify bad design practices, and it can even affect the producibility of your board. Like many aspects of a physical PCB layout, via stitching and copper pour can be like acid: quite useful if implemented properly, but also dangerous if used indiscriminately.

MOSFET Components
Blog
Should You Use Power MOSFETs in Series?

Power MOSFETs enable a huge range of electronic systems, specifically in situations where BJTs are not useful or efficient. MOSFETs can be used in high current systems in parallel arrangements, but what about their use in series? Both arrangements of MOSFETs have their pitfalls that designers should consider. Let’s look at MOSFETs in series as they are quite useful in certain systems, but be careful to design your circuits and your PCB for reliability.

MLCC controlled ESR capacitor
Blog
Controlled ESR Capacitors: Should You Use Them for Power Integrity?

I can’t think of a single product I’ve built that doesn’t require capacitors. We often talk a lot about effective series inductance (ESL) in capacitors and its effects on power integrity. What about effective series resistance (ESR)? Is there a technique you can use to determine the appropriate level of resistance, and can you use ESR to your advantage?

Ground Pour, Impedance and Losses
Blog
Microstrip Ground Clearance Part 2: How Clearance Affects Losses

If your goal is to hit a target impedance, and you’re worried about how nearby pour might affect impedance, you can get closer than the limits set by the 3W rule. But what are the effects on losses? If the reason for this question isn’t obvious, or if you’re not up-to-date on the finer points of transmission line design, then keep reading to see how nearby ground pour can affect losses in impedance-controlled interconnects.

Choosing the Right Microphone for Embedded Applications
Blog
Choosing the Right Microphone for Embedded Applications

If you need to capture sound waves for your electrical device to process, you'll need a microphone. However, microphones these days have become very advanced, and there are so many options to choose from. They range from the relatively simple and popular condenser type microphones to state-of-the-art sound conversion solutions incorporating internal amplifiers and other electronic processing functionality. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the options available.

 Computer planet with circuit grid
Blog
Composite Amplifiers and How They Give the Best of Both Worlds

There are many times where you need an amplifier with high gain, low noise, high slew rate, and broad bandwidth simultaneously. However, not all of these design goals are possible with all off-the-shelf components. Here are some points to consider when working with a composite amplifier design and how to evaluate your design with the right set of circuit simulation tools.

Tag
Embedded thumbnail for Stackup Creation and editing
How to work with Layer Stack Manager
Stackup Creation and editing

This video shows how to view and edit the PCB Layer Stack, select materials and add new layers

Embedded thumbnail for Configuring Your PCB Library
How to create a PCB Footprint
Configuring Your PCB Library

It is important to have accurate footprints to manufacture your PCB. Learn how to configure your PCB library to facilitate footprint creation.

Global parameters
What's New in 22.6
Quick Browsing of Parameters for a Board

Parametric information for your board is now conveniently available from the Properties panel. A single, convenient location with which to browse system, calculated and user-defined parameters, and place as needed in the form of special strings.

Global parameters
What's New in 22.6
电路板参数的快速浏览

您现在可以从Properties面板中轻松获得电路板的参数信息。可以在一个方便的位置,浏览系统、计算和用户定义参数,并根据需要以特殊字符串的形式进行放置。

Embedded thumbnail for How to Validate Links Between Components and Footprints
How-To's
How to Validate Links Between Components and Footprints

Before importing or updating data from the circuit to the board, you must first verify that all components of the circuit are associated with Footprint. Watch this video to learn how to validate the links between your schematic components and footprints.

Embedded thumbnail for How to use Copy Room Format
How to work with Rooms
How to use Copy Room Format

Rooms allow you to use rules on specific areas of your design. This helps immensely with properly defining trace widths and hole sizes for specific components. We’ll show you how easy it is to assign rules to specific rooms in the PCB.

Embedded thumbnail for How To Do Versioning And Releases by Robert Feranec and Michal Faruga
Discovering Altium 365
How To Do Versioning And Releases by Robert Feranec and Michal Faruga

Meet Robert Feranec in an educational video on version control, project history, comments, comparison and other features in Altium Designer 

Active Links in Text
What's New in 22.6
Active Links in Text

You can now specify active links to components and nets within a text frame object on a schematic. This handy navigation aid makes it much easier not only to read the document, but also to work with it.

Active Links in Text
What's New in 22.6
文本中的活动链接

您现在可以在原理图上的文本框对象中,指定指向元件和网络的活动链接。使用此导航辅助工具,即可轻松读取和处理文档。

Multifunctional Pins
What's New in 22.6
Multifunctional pins

You will often see that modern ICs consist of multi-functional pins. In this latest version of Altium Designer it has become far easier and much more convenient to work with such components.

Multifunctional Pins
What's New in 22.6
多功能引脚

常见的现代IC均由多功能引脚组成。在最新版Altium Designer中,我们能够更加轻松、方便地处理此类元件。

Embedded thumbnail for Using Rooms in Rules
How to work with Rooms
Using Rooms in Rules

Rooms allow you to use rules on specific areas of your design. This helps immensely with properly defining trace widths and hole sizes for specific components. We’ll show you how easy it is to assign rules to specific rooms in the PCB.

Embedded thumbnail for Creating a Schematic Symbol: Dealing with Power Pins
How to create a Schematic Symbol
Creating a Schematic Symbol: Dealing with Power Pins

Multiple schematic symbols often require the use of multiple power and ground pins. We’ll show you the difference between hidden and visible power pins, and the various methods you can use to use them in your design however it works best for you.

Embedded thumbnail for Allowing Permanent Display of Some Layers
How-To's
Allowing Permanent Display of Some Layers

This video demonstrates how to permanently display some layers in the PCB using the View configuration panel.

Embedded thumbnail for Creating Rooms in the PCB
How to work with Rooms
Creating Rooms in the PCB

If you want to create a room manually in the PCB or have them generated for the Schematic, Altium Designer allows you to create custom rooms. We’ll show you how to hand draw different rooms, how to create rooms by defining them through the room definition, and how to have them generated for the schematic and pushed through to the PCB by the Engineering Change Order.

Embedded thumbnail for Creating a Schematic Symbol - Placing Designators and Comments
How to create a Schematic Symbol
Creating a Schematic Symbol - Placing Designators and Comments

Placing your designator or comments can be done automatically, but that doesn’t mean they’re visible. We’ll walk you through how to make them visible and position them correctly no matter what orientation your symbol is with automatic positioning.

Tag
Your search returns no results.