PCB Design Resources and Information | Altium

Explore content from blog posts to technical white papers gathered together for your convenience. All written by Altium's community of PCB design experts.

Propagation Delay Adjustments: Keep Your Pulse Trains On Time When you have an analog watch, daylight savings time can wreak havoc in your personal and professional life. You might wake up and not even realize that you are an hour off schedule. No one wants to admit that they have fallen victim to daylight savings time, and your entire schedule has to resynchronize when this happens. Synchronizing your clock and your electronics components is critical in high-speed PCB design. Applications like bus trace Read Article

Choose Unified Symbols for Your PCB Prototype Design Documents I love spending hours at the bench soldering parts together and looking at the resultant signals they produce. It is satisfying to see the signals take shape on the oscilloscope as I refine each block. I’m surrounded by tools and equipment, little bits of wire and solder strewed from the invention process. Joining the beautiful mess are scattered components pulled from sample parts binders stored in the lab. Soon my prototype design will be ready Read Article

Customize designs with Consistent and Flexible Custom Rules and Queries In the early stages of a circuit design, I frequently consider mechanical dimensions along with circuit requirements. Knowing dimensions of large components helps me visualize where they will fit with respect to overall three-dimensional device enclosure and the board’s location within the space. During the thought experiment for fit, I begin making notes about tolerances I’ll push as a tradeoff between electrical functionality and mechanical Read Article

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Use Altium Multi-Channel Design for Easy Repeat Circuit Use If you are like me, you would agree that one of the most wasteful exercises is repeating the same task over and over again. Of course, I am not referring to activities that require repetition in order to achieve a good level of competence. After all, practice does make perfect. Instead, I am speaking of the wasteful recreation of a completed PCB design to use in a different product, which is akin to reinventing the wheel when it is already in use Read Article

OnTrack Newsletter May 2018 On Track Newsletter May 2018 VOL. 2 No 2 Welcome to the May edition of the Altium OnTrack Newsletter! AltiumLive 2018: ANNUAL PCB DESIGN SUMMIT is coming in October to sunny San Diego, California and pre-registration is now open! By pre-registering now, you will qualify for a 10% early-bird discount once registration officially opens in June (Stay tuned for more information about our European conference). Once again, we will be featuring Read Article

DFA Tips from Duane Benson at Screaming Circuits Duane Benson from Screaming Circuits shares DFA Tips and a piece of history as he shares the story behind the scenes in developing quick turn prototypes. Listen to learn how one entrepreneur brought a fresh perspective to the business that led to great success. And see why Screaming Circuits is uniquely positioned to handle all the leading-edge components that PCB designers have available. Listen to the Podcast: Download this episode (right click Read Article

Inventors Should Spend Time Designing and Less Time Writing a Bill of Materials There’s a beautiful sense of satisfaction that comes with building something great. You took the time to think through the concept, perfect your design, and translate your vision into a functional prototype. You’re driven to bring your product to market, but you don’t want to spend time worrying about documentation. Your bill of materials is like a recipe and a shopping list for your new product, all rolled into a single document. The bill of Read Article

Incorporating DFM for Panelization in Your Electronics Oftentimes, in a larger production environment, companies seek small tips and tricks along the manufacturing route in the hopes of significant cost savings. As a ‘low hanging fruit’ of costs savings, manufacturing is (or at least should be) a highly discussed topic early on in the design phase. Keeping manufacturing principles and specifications in mind at the design stage is what is known as design for manufacturing (DFM). There are a handful of Read Article

Hybrid or Compact: Fractal Antennas in PCB Design The Mandelbrot Set was always a popular poster among my fellow students when I was in college. The zoomed-out picture hung on dorm room walls and even appeared on some graphic t-shirts. The fact that no one seemed to know about the Mandelbrot Set or understand fractals didn’t seem to matter. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how useful fractals could be in designing antennas. There are many antennas in the PCB world including: microstrip Read Article

Build High Density Interconnect PCBs with Skip Vias My friends and I took a road trip over the weekend. When three people take a three-hour car ride in a small sports car, you come up with some creative ways to pack all your stuff (and yourselves) in such a small space. The demand for faster boards with higher component density constraints has forced PCB designers to use a number of creative routing techniques in multilayer boards. Skip vias, dog bone traces, pad-in-trace, microvias, and back Read Article

Increase Your Component and Trace High Density With Via-in-pad Technology I’ve got this awesome four-speaker stereo system with a subwoofer in my apartment that my neighbors love to hate. As much as I enjoy listening to music on this thing, the only part I hate is the mess of audio cords that hide behind the speakers. The last time I tried to clean behind my system, I nearly ripped out some of the audio cords. If only routing my high density of audio cords was as easy as routing traces on an HDI printed circuit board Read Article

Component Information Management in a Unified Design Environment Selecting components for your PCB device gives it life and should be performed carefully. If you have ever looked for components to use in your PCB, you will find that the list of available components is massive. Each component has a long datasheet that defines its footprint, electrical specifications, pin arrangement, etc. Rather than read through datasheets all day trying to decide which components you need, all this information should be Read Article

Should You Use Thick or Thin FR4 for Your PCB Substrate? If you’ve ever made a pie with your kids, you know that the thickness of your crust is important. Too thin, and the pie falls apart into a mess of filling. Too thick, and you might as well be chewing on a loaf of bread. Getting the thickness just right is what makes a pie worth eating. Even though PCB substrate materials are non-conductive and do not carry current, the thickness of your FR4 PCB substrate determines the board's structural strength Read Article

Design for Easy Processes: Create and Link Supplier Data to Any Component If you’ve spent any time with Altium Designer, you’ll already have some familiarity with the ease and simplicity behind such a powerful library platform. There are times, however, when these libraries will require you to get your hands dirty. Whether it be a simple part number change, or re-engineering some key parameters, your edits can be simplistically updated in a matter of moments. In this specific example, we’ll take a look at a common Read Article

The PCB Design Advantages You Can Expect with Altium Designer 3D Viewing I read once about a test pilot during World War II who complained about how a new fighter plane’s engine quit on him when he rolled the plane on its back. This is a pretty basic maneuver for a fighter, but because the engine wasn’t designed for inverted flight it couldn’t perform as it was expected to. I remember that story because I have had a similar experience with many of the PCB CAD systems that I have used over the years. Because those Read Article

EMI Reducing PCB Shielding Techniques to Incorporate in Your Designs I spent most of my twenties producing and mastering music for local artists. As much as I love older consoles, it gets annoying to listen to audio from one channel bleeding over to other channels. Newer consoles are built with proper EMI shielding and crosstalk reduction measures, and the analog signals in these newer consoles are much cleaner. Digital devices are not immune either. Modern computers and smartphones continue to pack more silicon Read Article

Let Your Designs Talk for You: Export Altium 3D Layout Artwork to Adobe® PDF It wasn’t long ago that getting to new places around town required talking and writing down verbal instructions from another. I’d pull out my city map and study the route, having to note each street and intersection where I’d turn. It worked, but it took concentration and good map-reading skills. Today, I use my smart phone’s map feature and audio capabilities to get where I’m going. Assembly instructions for printed circuits contain the same Read Article