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Embedded thumbnail for Coming Soon: Advanced Via Fencing
New in Altium's Software
Coming Soon: Advanced Via Fencing

Coming soon to Altium software: Advanced Via Fencing gives you greater control over creating and managing shielding and stitching vias for RF and high-speed designs. Configure via fences directly from the Properties panel, follow traces or geometry edges, use stacked vias, define spacing and patterns, and preview the results before generating them.

NEW
Blog
How Design Review Automation Saves Hours (and Headaches) Per Project

Design review automation helps teams spend less time managing feedback and more time improving the design. This article explores how centralized comments, structured checklists, action tracking, and approval workflows can make reviews faster, more consistent, and easier to close.

NEW
Embedded thumbnail for 5 DC Power Integrity Myths That Ruin Your PCB Design
How-To's
5 DC Power Integrity Myths That Ruin Your PCB Design

DC power integrity plays a critical role in the reliability of nearly every power electronics board, yet common misconceptions can lead to costly design decisions. In this video, we break down five of the most common DC power integrity myths and explain what you really need to know for reliable power electronics design.

NEW
Blog
Comparing Flex and Rigid-Flex PCBs: When to Use What?

This article compares flex and rigid-flex PCBs across key design and manufacturing considerations, including cost, bend radius, impedance, and assembly complexity. It explains how choosing the right construction early can help reduce design risks and ensure better manufacturability.

Embedded thumbnail for A fraction of a millimeter is the difference between a robot that fits and one that doesn't
Collaborative Engineering with Team Ribbot
A fraction of a millimeter is the difference between a robot that fits and one that doesn't

Check out the latest episode about Team Ribbot and see how they move design data between their electrical and mechanical tools without losing accuracy. Discover how Altium Designer and MCAD CoDesign help bring the boards, housings, and custom motors together right the first time with no surprises.

Embedded thumbnail for  HDI PCB Stackup Breakdown - Etching Weight Via Spacing, & More
How-To's
HDI PCB Stackup Breakdown - Etching Weight Via Spacing, & More

HDI PCB design depends on getting the stackup and manufacturing constraints right. In this deep dive, we examine a real HDI audio-interface board and explore common pitfalls, from how copper weight and etching affect minimum clearances to why solder mask slivers below 1 mil can cause manufacturing issues. You’ll also learn how proper board-edge clearance and copper pullback help protect SMD pads during routing.

Blog
PCB Assembly Outputs

The right PCB assembly outputs turn a finished design into a buildable product. This article covers the essential manufacturing files and DFA considerations that help ensure assemblers have the information they need for accurate, reliable production.

Embedded thumbnail for  How do you review a robot design when your team is never in the same room?
Collaborative Engineering with Team Ribbot
How do you review a robot design when your team is never in the same room?

Team Ribbot’s engineers are spread across five states and juggle full-time jobs while building a 250-pound combat robot in their spare time. Discover how Altium Designer and Altium 365 keep the team connected, letting engineers open the live design from a laptop or phone, inspect the board in 3D, and leave comments directly on the design.

Blog
Holistic Engineering Management in Electronic Design

This webinar explores how engineering leaders can gain greater visibility and control across complex electronic design workflows. Discover how connected processes and centralized design data help teams reduce risk, improve collaboration, and deliver projects on time.

Blog
PCB Design Variants: Managing Multiple PCBA Versions

Product variations often require different component populations, alternate parts, or configuration settings while keeping the underlying PCB design unchanged. This article explains how structured variant management keeps these differences organized and ensures each configuration has the correct BOM and manufacturing outputs.

Embedded thumbnail for  Improve Visual Accuracy with True Arcs
New in Altium's Software
Improve Visual Accuracy with True Arcs

Discover how True Arc Rendering improves arc visualization in the PCB Editor and PCB Library Editor by displaying true arcs across 2D, 3D, and Board Planning modes. This provides a more accurate representation of board geometry and helps you work with curved features with greater precision throughout the design process.

Embedded thumbnail for Two engineers, one board, nobody's work gets wiped out
Collaborative Engineering with Team Ribbot
Two engineers, one board, nobody's work gets wiped out

When Team Ribbot’s electrical and mechanical engineers work on the same combat-robot design, unwanted changes can mean hours of lost work. See how Altium Designer and MCAD CoDesign let the team review and selectively accept changes, enabling seamless parallel collaboration across different locations and schedules.

Embedded thumbnail for Visualize and Refine Your Harness Designs
New in Altium's Software
Visualize and Refine Your Harness Designs

Create detailed views of bundle contents, control wire and cable paths, and rotate physical models to accurately represent the final harness assembly. These capabilities give you greater control over harness design and help ensure your digital model reflects the physical result.

Embedded thumbnail for Introducing Agentic Requirements Engineering
New in Altium's Software
Introducing Agentic Requirements Engineering

Discover a new way to work with Requirements Portal through Agentic Requirements Engineering. AI agents analyze your project data and surface proposals for your approval, reducing friction in requirements management and helping align your team's shared model with your design intent.

Embedded thumbnail for Simplify Rule Set Updates and Replacement
New in Altium's Software
Simplify Rule Set Updates and Replacement

Learn how to import rule sets with greater flexibility in Altium. When importing rules, you can add new rules to your existing set, replace only rules that match, or completely replace the current rule set giving you full control over how design rules are updated.

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Blog
Nucleo Shields Multi-Board Design

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.

Blog
Analog Solar Tracker Project

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.

Blog
Concept Phase – Initial CAD Design

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.

Blog
High-Speed PCB Design Tips

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

Introduction to Open Source Laptop Project
Blog
Introduction to Open Source Laptop Project

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.

Blog
Ebook: Routing High-Density Interconnects with Reliable Microvias

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.

Blog
IPC-2221 Calculator for PCB Trace Current and Heating

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?

Blog
Stripline Impedance Calculator

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.

Blog
Which Types of Opto-Isolators Are Right For Your Signal?

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?

Blog
Properties panel document options in SCH editors

The Properties panel provides access to the properties of documents and objects. The contents of the panel change depending on the active document or the selected object. This blog will quickly go over some of need to know options around the properties panel in the schematic document.

High-Speed PCB Stackup Design
Blog
The High-Speed PCB Stackup Design Challenge

Even with all the good guidelines out there for high speed design, there are particular aspects of stackup construction and their relation to building boards that get overlooked. This blog is goes beyond just the typical SI/PI guidelines and looks at these problems from more of an engineering perspective.

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Embedded thumbnail for Import and Export with Modern Mechanical Models
New in Altium's Software
Import and Export with Modern Mechanical Models

We have expanded mechanical integration by adding support for SOLIDWORKS 2024 and SOLIDWORKS 2025 part models when importing 3D bodies into the design environment. This enhancement allows designers to work with the latest mechanical models created in SOLIDWORKS without the need for additional conversions or workarounds.

Embedded thumbnail for How to Input Via Delay in Altium for DDR Routing
How-To's
How to Input Via Delay in Altium for DDR Routing

In this video, we tackle a real viewer question about DDR3 routing across multiple PCB layers and show how via delay can silently eat into your skew margin before you’ve even finished routing, using Altium’s default 10-layer stackup as a reference.

Embedded thumbnail for Clearly Show Jumper Wires in Your Harness Designs
New in Altium's Software
Clearly Show Jumper Wires in Your Harness Designs

Support has been improved so that jumper wires connecting two cavities within the same connector are now properly shown in Layout Drawings, making the connector wiring easier to understand during documentation and review.

Embedded thumbnail for Why Datasheet PCB Guidelines Are Often Wrong
How-To's
Why Datasheet PCB Guidelines Are Often Wrong

Watch our brand-new video where we tackle the persistent issue of outdated PCB design guidelines still found in datasheets and application notes from major semiconductor manufacturers. Drawing on viewer comments, real-world datasheet examples, and insights from industry experts, we examine why recommendations such as splitting analog and digital ground planes (an approach rooted in the 1980s) continue to circulate despite their potential to cause EMC failures, signal integrity problems, and costly redesigns.

Embedded thumbnail for Keep Your Harness Designs in Sync with Library Updates
New in Altium's Software
Keep Your Harness Designs in Sync with Library Updates

The "Update From Libraries" feature has been enhanced to provide broader support for harness-related objects across both Wiring Diagrams and Layout Drawings. With this expansion, a wider range of harness components such as connectors, wires, splices, and associated attributes can now be synchronized directly with their corresponding library definitions.

Embedded thumbnail for How to Set Up Flex PCB Materials in Altium
How-To's
How to Set Up Flex PCB Materials in Altium

Discover how to set up flex and rigid-flex PCB materials in Altium with the Layer Stack Manager. In this tutorial, you’ll follow the key steps for defining polyimide cores, adhesive layers, coverlay, and stiffeners helping you build accurate, production-ready rigid-flex PCB designs.

Embedded thumbnail for How Benchmark Unifies Hardware Development with the Altium Platform
Altium Stories
How Benchmark Unifies Hardware Development with the Altium Platform

Discover our latest customer success story and see how Benchmark streamlined hardware development using the Altium Platform. By leveraging a unified environment with real-time data, synchronized ECAD-MCAD workflows, and built-in collaboration tools, their engineering teams eliminated manual handoffs, improved cross-domain visibility, and accelerated project delivery while staying perfectly aligned.

Embedded thumbnail for ESP32-S3 Design Deep Dive: Power, RF, and Layout Best Practices
How-To's
ESP32-S3 Design Deep Dive: Power, RF, and Layout Best Practices

Explore our detailed design review of a custom ESP32-S3 PCB. This four-layer board is built around the ESP32-S3 microcontroller chip (not the standard module) and includes an integrated LiPo charging circuit, USB-C with data line protection, NCP voltage regulators, and a ceramic chip antenna with a properly tuned impedance matching network.

Embedded thumbnail for Working as One for What Matters Most | How Benchmark Unifies Engineering Teams
Altium Stories
Working as One for What Matters Most | How Benchmark Unifies Engineering Teams

See how Benchmark Electronics uses Altium’s collaborative hardware development platform to unify its electrical, mechanical, and software engineering teams. By replacing manual processes, disconnected tools, and siloed workflows with a shared workspace, Benchmark unlocked a new way of working.

Embedded thumbnail for PCB Design Tips to Improve RF Power Amplifier Layout
How-To's
PCB Design Tips to Improve RF Power Amplifier Layout

Take a deeper look at RF power amplifier PCB design as we expand on our original 6 GHz RF signal generator tutorial with an in-depth design review. Discover essential layout optimization techniques such as switching regulator routing, feedback loop placement, stitching via implementation, and effective copper balancing.

Embedded thumbnail for How Altium's Assembly Assistant unifies Quantum Systems' Dev Process
Altium Stories
How Altium's Assembly Assistant unifies Quantum Systems' Dev Process

Quantum Systems develops unmanned drone systems for aerial intelligence and rapid, field-ready innovation. With the Assembly Assistant, their team streamlined a once tedious prototype build process, eliminating manual exports, file conversions, and unnecessary guesswork.

Embedded thumbnail for Creating Stacking Stripes for PCB Fabrication: Altium Tutorial
How-To's
Creating Stacking Stripes for PCB Fabrication: Altium Tutorial

Watch our new tutorial where we demonstrate how to place stacking stripes along the edge of a PCB and configure design rules to control clearances. In this video, you’ll learn how to create a dummy net, use the query system to apply rules specifically to stacking stripes, and leverage split planes on internal layers.

Embedded thumbnail for Empower Your Designs with Advanced Power Analysis
How-To's
Empower Your Designs with Advanced Power Analysis

Power Analyzer brings clarity. Agile Teams brings control. Combined, they help teams deliver reliable hardware with confidence.

Embedded thumbnail for Component Selection Process Tips for PCB Design
How-To's
Component Selection Process Tips for PCB Design

Explore our new component selection tutorial and learn Zach Peterson’s proven approach to finding and choosing parts that take your electronic designs from good to exceptional.

Embedded thumbnail for Signal Analyzer by Keysight Promo Video
How-To's
Signal Analyzer by Keysight Promo Video

Design faster, collaborate smarter, and catch signal integrity issues early with Altium Agile Teams and the Signal Integrity Analyzer by Keysight — both integrated directly into Altium Designer Agile. Check out our new promo video to learn more.

Embedded thumbnail for NFC Reader Testing: Flashing and Validating the Project
How-To's
NFC Reader Testing: Flashing and Validating the Project

Join Zach Peterson as we build and test an NFC reader board from start to finish. You’ll see how a custom NFC reader goes from manufacturing to working hardware, with step-by-step guidance on firmware flashing, power checks, and RFID tag detection.

Tag
Integrating Requirements June 2025 Webinar
On-Demand Webinar May 28, 2025
Integrating Requirements into Your PCB Design Workflow
Join our webinar where you will learn about integrated requirements tools who can help you eliminate late-stage design changes, AI support through system requirements and integration of design requirements directly in PCB Design. Don't miss it, register now!
Streamlining Team Collaboration
On-Demand Webinar Apr 17, 2025
Streamlining Team Collaboration in Industrial PCB Projects
Join us for our upcoming webinar to discover how Altium Designer and Altium 365 can transform your team’s collaboration and take your PCB design projects to the next level. Attend for a chance to win free access to the Altium 365 Training Bundle.
PCB CoDesign Webinar
On-Demand Webinar Jan 24, 2024
Discover How Altium Designer 24 Revolutionizes Team Dynamics in PCB Design
Expand your collaboration skills and stay ahead of the curve with PCB CoDesign. Design teams often grapple with prolonged design cycles and coordination issues, leading to delays and inefficiencies. In the current landscape, design processes are hindered by fragmented collaboration, resulting in increased layout times and difficulties in synchronizing design updates.