PCB Design ⚯

Welcome to a world of inspiration and innovation in PCB design. We are grateful to our amazing community for helping us foster collaboration and growth in electronics development. We hope to share the knowledge and experience we've gained after decades of research and creating Altium Designer, the best PCB design software, and Altium 365, the agile electronics development platform.

Explore our resources to expand your skills in PCB development and stay up to date with the latest technologies and best practices. Our informative articles and practical resources are aimed at helping electronics engineers and developers bring more successful products to market faster than ever before. Dive in and get inspired!

RF Trace Taper

How to Design an RF Trace Taper for Impedance Matching Transmission line taper structures can provide superior impedance matching between two transmission lines with approximately real impedance. Read Article

Supply Chain Strategy for PCB Designer

Supply Chain Strategy for PCB Designer Supply chain management expert Chris Cain shares his 37 years of experience and strategies to overcome electronic part shortages. Read Article

Reflectionless Matching vs. Conjugate Matching

Reflectionless Matching vs. Conjugate Matching: An Apparent Contradiction Are reflectionless matching and conjugate matching contradictory? When we look at the formulation for power waves and S-parameters, we see where these are different. Read Article

Altium Designer 22.9 Brings New Productivity Features For Commenting and Design Reuse

Altium Designer 22.9 Brings New Productivity Features For Commenting and Design Reuse October 14, 2022 ONTRACK BI-WEEKLY What’s New in Altium Designer? The newest enhancements in Altium Designer 22.9 include design reuse updates, a variant update, and a new feature in the footprint editor: Variant improvement in schematics - AD22.9 brings even more improvements to variant creation and management. New tools help streamline creation and management of design variants. Add comments to your BOM - The Comments feature can now be used in Read Article

Quarter-Wave Transformer

Quarter-Wave Transformer Design For Real and Reactive Loads All quarter-wavelength transformers can be used for real loads, but some can be used for reactive loads with an additional transmission line section. Read Article

Streamlining Product Development Process for Successful Launch

Streamlining Product Development Process for Successful Launch Ben and Connor of Aptus Design Works shares some great advice for both designers and companies to streamline their product development process from prototyping to manufacturing. Read Article

Link Budget Calculator

RF Signal Chain and Link Budget Basics Learn about link budget in RF design and use our link budget calculator to evaluate your RF signal chain. Read Article

Buck Converter Component Sizing

Buck Converter Component Sizing An overview of what calculations are required when sizing components for a switching buck converter. Read Article

Try These New Features in Altium Designer 22.9

Try These New Features in Altium Designer 22.9 September 23, 2022 ONTRACK BI-WEEKLY What’s New in Altium Designer? The newest enhancements in Altium Designer 22.9 include design reuse updates, a variant update, and an extension of commenting features: Variant improvement in schematics - AD22.9 brings even more improvements to variant creation and management. New tools help streamline creation and management of design variants. Add comments to your BOM - The much-loved commenting feature is Read Article

USB High Speed (ULPI) Routing

USB High Speed (ULPI) Routing Learn what ULPI is for USB High Speed interfaces, as well as best practices for routing this bus on a PCB. Read Article

Differential Oscilloscope Probe Project

Differential Oscilloscope Probe Project Do you need a differential probe for your oscilloscope? Join Mark Harris designing a DIY differential probe, and exploring the advantages of using a differential probe for testing your circuit. Read Article

Pros and Cons of Advanced Electronic Packaging for PCB Designers

Pros and Cons of Advanced Electronic Packaging for PCB Designers Our guest Phil Marcoux is very well-known in the advanced electronic packaging community and currently working as a business mentor in the electronics industry. Today we will tackle the pros and cons of heterogeneous electronic assemblies and what we can do as an industry to move forward with it. Read Article

SMD pad size

Best Methods for Calculating SMD Pad Size in PCB Design Component creation requires accurate SMD pad sizes in your PCB footprints. See how to determine pad sizes for your SMD components. Read Article

pcb component warpage causes

Component Warpage Causes in a PCB A staff member at a PCB manufacturer once explained to me that they thought we were having an issue with a package warping. Prior to this I had assumed that this was highly unlikely in standard component packages used in a PCBA. Unfortunately, component warping can occur both in a PCB and in components. Mechanical mishandling leading to bending is an obvious one, but there are potentially other problems that could cause component warpage without Read Article

bga fanout pcb routing

Which BGA Pad and Fanout Strategy is Right for Your PCB? Your BGA fanout strategy depends on the BGA pad size and your pin density. Learn how to pair the right BGA pad size with PCB trace width in this article. Read Article

ADC Ground

How to Properly Ground ADCs Grounding with an ADC will influence noise injection into the board and it should be dealt with carefully when building a mixed-signal system. Read Article

Cutting Edge Technology in Packaging with an Interposer

Cutting Edge Technology in Packaging with an Interposer In this episode, our guest Joe Dickson, tells us about the cutting-edge technology implemented in advanced packaging at Wus Printed Circuit International. Read Article