News & Updates
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Thermal Management for Integrated Circuits
As anyone who designs and builds electronic devices knows, the device will generate heat when it’s switched on. Wherever current flows through an impedance, energy losses will manifest themselves as heat. Integrated circuit packaging is getting smaller to meet the trend for more compact devices but at the cost of poorer thermal properties. This article describes the basic thermal management approaches to consider in your next designs.
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Anatomy of Latitude Part Two: "Thread with a Needle” in the context of energy
We continue to explore the magic of energy conversion in a PWM transducer. Why is it magic? Theoretically, in a PWM transducer this happens without losses, isn't that magic? A PWM transducer, like a tailor with scissors, cuts the “fabric of energy” into pieces, and then, like a sewing machine, stitches the pieces of energy into a dress - DC Magnitude. What is a constant component and how can we get it? Let's explore!
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Anatomy of Latitude Part One: Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) as a Result of the Evolution of Linear Systems
There are different techniques in the world of technology to achieve various goals, both final and intermediate. Some techniques are so successful that they are commonly used with high efficiency. Electronics is no exception. The greatest example is the use of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signals (energy), which is applied in any modern electronic device. To apply PWM effectively, it is necessary to understand the engineering difficulties that engineers faced in the past, and the thoughts and ideas that subsequently were combined into effective, complete PWM power solutions.
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What Influences Electrolytic Capacitor Lifespan?
If you speak with a bunch of design engineers, you might quickly form the opinion that the electrolytic capacitor has a particularly dubious reputation. A faulty electrolyte mix used in these types of capacitors led to premature device failures, and quite often, a “bit of a mess” was made to the PCBs on which they were soldered. However, despite the problem of the capacitor plague, this article is focusing on helping the designer understand how to get many more years of useful life from an electrolytic capacitor.
On-Demand Webinar
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Using Version Control in Your PCB Project Webinar
Version control has been a staple of software development for decades, but hardware development can benefit just as much from a version control system (VCS). Traditionally, VCS has been managed locally tying you down to a workplace, but advances in cloud technology have removed that limitation. Learn how Altium 365 cloud technology enables working concurrently on designs with built-in version control and evaluate its advantages.
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Creating Elegant and Readable Schematics
A schematic drawing will not only tell your PCB design software what needs to connect where, but it also communicates the purpose of a circuit to other people. It’s easy to create a schematic, but it can be harder to make a helpful schematic that can be quickly and easily read and comprehended by the reader. In this guide, based on years of industry experience, we will show you how to improve your schematic layout so that your designs are elegant and readable.
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Must Have Rapid Prototyping Tools
Suppose your job involves rapidly iterating designs or creating a wide variety of products for clients. In that case, there are some essential tools available that can save you a tremendous amount of time, bringing high engineering risk devices to completion successfully. Whether you’re working on internal projects or developing high mix devices for clients as a consulting or freelance firm, these indispensable tools will help you ship a higher quality product in less time.
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Best Practices for Sharing PCB Files vs. Sharing PCB Projects
Even though today’s cloud platforms are immaculately secure and they allow a range of files to be easily shared, there are times where you should limit the data you’re sharing to only the critical files required. For PCB designers, this means either sharing entire design projects or sharing individual files with your manufacturer, customers, contractors, or collaborators. If you want to eliminate liabilities and keep your team’s design data secure, consider these best practices for sharing PCB design data with Altium 365.
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Best Practices for Using Reference Designs
Best component companies will release reference designs for their new and legacy products to show designers an example application for a component. If the reference design is good enough and it very nicely illustrates how to quickly engineer around a few main components, I’m likely to use them in the design and the component maker has just earned my business. If you’re a newer designer and you’re wondering whether reference designs are right for your next project, follow these best practices so that you don’t make any mistakes with your reference design.
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Transmission Line Fundamentals And Electromagnetic Fields, Part 1
When we deal with “abstract” aspects of electromagnetic fields and how they function, it can be easy to get lost in the weeds regarding them. The first part of this article will address an important aspect of transmission line fundamentals, namely how electromagnetic fields and waves propagate on a transmission line. This article’s end goal is to create a core understanding of these concepts so that when it comes time to design a PDS, the proper design methodologies are followed and a properly working PDS is achieved appropriately, the first time and every time.
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Your Complete Guide to Via Stub Analysis
Via stubs are sometimes viewed as an annoyance, especially when you only need to make a transition between adjacent layers. For low speed, less-dense boards with low layer count, via stubs are an afterthought, or they may not receive consideration at all. For faster edge rates/higher frequencies, the conventional wisdom is to remove all via stubs. The question is: what exactly counts as “high frequency,” and how do you figure out the relevant length?
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Using a Thermal Camera for PCB Diagnostics
Unlike the clumsy human finger, a thermal camera can detect minute temperature differences across its view. This allows you to rapidly identify any components that are consuming current. Any parts or areas of your board that draw current will also generate heat that can easily be picked up by a thermal camera.
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Complete Guide to DIY SMT Assembly In Your Office
I want to share a little secret with you in this article: Assembling SMT prototypes boards is not only easy, but it requires very little equipment. Using just a stencil, I can easily hand prototype down to 0.3 mm pitch ICs, and 0201 (imperial) sized passive components. If you’re currently hand assembling boards with a soldering station, you need to stop this immediately and start using a stencil instead!
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State of the Electronics Industry 2021
With the challenges of 2020 behind us, what challenges and opportunities lie ahead for hardware designers in 2021? In this article Vince Mazur, Technical Product Marketing Engineer at Altium, looks ahead to three emerging trends and share steps to address each one successfully in the year ahead.
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The Mysterious 50 Ohm Impedance: Where It Came From and Why We Use It
When we talk about S-parameters, impedance matching, transmission lines, and other fundamental concepts in RF/high-speed PCB design, the concept of 50 Ohm impedance comes up over and over. Look through signaling standards, component datasheets, application notes, and design guidelines on the internet; this is one impedance value that comes up repeatedly. So where did the 50 Ohm impedance standard come from and why is it important?
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Keeping Your Circuits Dry
For the home hobbyist, protecting their electrical devices usually means keeping the coffee cup or soda can away from anything that carries a large voltage. Good practice indicates that electrical devices should be housed in an enclosure to protect expensive components and reduce the risk of electric shocks from exposed circuitry. However, what do you do if the fantastic new device you’ve designed needs to work in a humid, damp, or dripping wet environment?
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DFM in PCB Material Selection
Every design should begin with selecting the materials that will appear in the PCB stackup, as well as arranging layers in the stackup to support layout and routing. This section of our PCB manufacturing andc DFM crash course focuses on selecting the right materials for your PCB design. Materials should be selected given the particular design requirements outlined in your specifications.
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How to Start an FPGA PCB Layout For Your Embedded System
FPGAs come in quad or BGA packages that can be difficult to floorplan, especially with the high number of I/Os often implemented in these components. FPGAs offer a lot of advantages in terms of their reconfigurability, but they can require a lot of effort to layout and route without headaches. If you’ve never worked with an FPGA in your PCB layout, we have some guidelines that can help you get started.
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How to Get 3-port S-parameters From a 2-port VNA Measurement
S-parameters are fundamental quantities in signal integrity, and an ability to understand them from measurement or analysis is very important. If you have a 3-port network, like a power divider or circulator, it may appear that you must use a 3-port VNA to measure these S-parameters. It is always acceptable to measure between two ports, but you need to know what exactly it is you are measuring. In this article, we’ll look at the relationship between the true 3-port S-parameters with a 2-port measurement.
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A Day in the Life of the PCB Manufacturing Process
Before implementing design for manufacturing, it is important to understand the underlying process behind producing a physical PCB. Regardless of the various technologies present in each facility, a large majority of industry-leading manufacturers follow a specific set of steps to turn your design from a drawing in a CAD application into a physical board. In this article, we'll cover the basics that designers need to know as part of our crash course series on PCB manufacturing.
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Addressing Skew Sources in High Speed PCBs
If you compile a list of skew sources, you'll see that fiber weave-induced skew is only one entry on a long list of skew sources. We'll look at this list of possible skew sources below, and we'll see how they affect the operation of your PCB. From the list below, we'll see that some of these issues with skew are not simply solved by paying attention to the fiber weave construction in a PCB substrate.
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Should Ground Be Placed Below Inductors in Switching Regulators?
We love answering questions from our readers and YouTube viewers, and one of the recent questions we received relates to EMI from switching elements in a switching regulator is "Should a cutout be placed below the inductor in a switching regulator circuit?". Despite the variations in inductors and their magnetic behavior, there are some general principles that can be used to judge the effects of placing ground near inductors in switching regulator circuits. We’ll look at some of these principles in this article
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Altium Designer 22.6 Update
We are happy to announce that the Altium Designer 22.6 update is now available. Altium Designer 22.6 continues to focus on improving the user experience, as well as performance and stability of the software, based on feedback from our users. Check out the key new features in the What's New section on the left side of this window!
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Join PCB Design Review Competition from Altium
Find 9 mistakes in a PCB design and get added into the lucky draw to win a prize from Altium!
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SAP (Semi-Additive PCB Process) – Top 5 Questions Regarding Stack Up
This Semi-Additive Process is an additional tool in the PCB fabricators' toolbox that enables them to provide feature sizes for trace width and spacing that are 25 microns, (1 mil) and below depending on the fabricators' imaging equipment. This provides much more flexibility to breakout out tight BGA areas and the ability to shrink overall circuit size and/ or reduce the number of circuit layers in the design. As the PCB design community embraces the benefits of this new printed circuit board fabrication technique, there are of course many questions to be answered.
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Improving Supply Chain Success with BOM Management
It’s no secret that component shortages have become more frequent this year. In fact, countries around the world are losing billions in revenue due to supply issues. Having the right components on hand is more crucial than ever as availability, obsolescence, counterfeit products and environmental non-compliance risks continue to grow. Fortunately, many shortages can be avoided by introducing proactive supply chain practices.
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What is the Impedance of Length-Tuning Structures?
Do length-tuning structures create an impedance discontinuity? The answer is an unequivocal “yes”, but it might not matter in your design depending on several factors. Applying a length-tuning structure is equivalent to changing the distance between the traces while meandering. Therefore, you will have a change in the odd-mode impedance of a single trace. The question then becomes: does this deviation in trace impedance in a length tuning structure matter?
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A-SAP™ – What do you need to know?
The continued miniaturization of both packaging and component size in next-generation electronics is becoming harder and harder to work around and presents a significant challenge for both PCB designers and PCB fabricators. To effectively navigate the constraints of the traditional subtractive-etch PCB fabrication processes, PCB designs require advanced PCB fabrication capabilities while pushing the limits of finer feature size, higher layer counts, multiple levels of stacked micro vias and increased lamination cycles.
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Pin-Package Delay and Via Delay in High Speed Length Tuning
Take a look at the inside of some integrated circuit packages, and you’ll find a number of wires bonded to the semiconductor die and the pads at the edge of the component's package. As a signal traverses makes its way along an interconnect and into a destination circuit, signals need to travel across these bond wires and pads before they are interpreted as a logic state. As you look around the edge of an IC, these bond wires can have different lengths, and they incur different levels of delay and contribute to total jitter.
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6-Layer PCB Design Guidelines
Once you’ve run out of room on your 4-layer PCB, it’s time to graduate to a 6-layer board. The additional layer can give you room for more signals, an additional plane pair, or a mix of conductors. How you use these extra layers is less important than how you arrange them in the PCB stackup, as well as how you route on a 6-layer PCB. If you’ve never used a 6-layer board before, or you’ve had EMI troubles with this stackup that are difficult to solve, keep reading to see some 6-layer PCB design guidelines and best practices.
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Altium Designer 22.5 Update
We are happy to announce that the Altium Designer 22.5 update is now available. Altium Designer 22.5 continues to focus on improving the user experience, as well as performance and stability of the software, based on feedback from our users. Check out the key new features in the What's New section on the left side of this window!
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How Reliable is Your Hybrid PCB Stackup?
PCB stackups often incorporate slightly dissimilar materials that could pose a reliability problem. Hybrid PCBs are one case where the PCB stackup will include different materials, typically a standard FR4 laminate and a PTFE laminate for RF PCBs. Designers who want to take the lead on material selection when designing their hybrid stackups should consider these factors that affect reliability. As with any PCB stackup, make sure you get your fabricator involved in the manufacturing process early to ensure reliability problems do not arise during production.
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