Mobile menu
Sign In
Home

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

Avoid Loose Signals With Successful Coin Acceptor Programs It’s been cold as an ice cube in an igloo lately, and the only thing that’s keeping my hands warm in the morning is my coffee. You know it won’t be a good day, though, when you’re getting a hot latte from a vending machine and the vending machine eats your coins. I end up with frozen hands and a caffeine headache by 10 am, or I end up having to reroute my whole morning just to run to another cafe. I understand that vending machines fail sometimes Read Article
Backroads or Highway: Managing PCB Power Distribution with a PDN Analyzer Who hasn’t been caught daydreaming out the window, overlooking the lines of cars on the freeway at a standstill, wondering about easier or more effective ways of getting to your job on time? And even then, sometimes the alternate routes aren’t always the fastest—there could be road construction, or an event going on which makes you have to re-route even more. At that point, most tend to throw all hopes for getting to work on time out the window Read Article
No Icebergs Here, Captain! Board Rule Checking for Bill of Materials Management You know the story of RMS Titanic and how just before midnight on April 14th, 1912, it struck an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean and sank. What you may not know though is how one small item may have saved the ship from sinking. During the inquiry, one of the surviving crew members who was a lookout reported that they did not have a pair of binoculars to use in the crow’s nest. When asked if having the binoculars would have made a difference or not Read Article
Don’t Get Caught Sleeping: Resolve PCB Power Distribution Problems I’ve got a heating problem at the moment—after 30 years of service to the various owners of this house, my furnace is finally throwing in the towel and no longer providing heat. Unfortunately, this has come at a, let’s say, inopportune time with it hovering just under freezing lately, and with nights being even more frigid. We installed an ad hoc heating system comprised of the gas fireplace and several space heaters; however, this is not a long Read Article
Hide and Seek: Key Serial-Number Chips for PIC Microcontroller Code Protection One of my favorite games, when I was young, was hide and seek. I would play with my friends and it was always fun to try and find a good hiding place. As an older brother, I played the same game with my younger brothers, but with a twist. Instead of hiding myself, I had to hide my stuff from them. If I picked good hiding places, my stuff was safe. However, if I was lackadaisical and chose poor hiding places they were sure to find my toys or Read Article
How To Use Version Control in CircuitStudio This video will cover how to setup and use the built in version control in CircuitStudio. Read Article
How to Set Up Design Rules in CircuitStudio Read Article
Completing a Pre-Layout Design Checklist Can Keep Your PCB Design from Crashing Many years ago I got my private pilot’s license, and there is nothing that I love better than being behind the controls of a small plane. When the plane leaps off the runway and into the sky, the feeling is exhilarating. Then, after executing a perfectly smooth landing, there is a sense of triumphant success. In addition to the pure joy of flying, there are also many ideas and lessons that I have taken from my time in the air. One of these has Read Article
Don't Stay in the Tower: BOM System Communication and Component Pricing Costs Once upon a time, way back in the dark ages of the 20th century, there were three kingdoms: design, manufacturing, and purchasing. The royal design engineer’s process would look like this: they’d design the product, take their carriage to the manufacturing department kingdom where the designer would submit the design quickly and leave, trying to minimize as much chatter and cross communication as possible. The manufacturing engineers who receive Read Article
Don't Let Lithography Issues Cast a Shadow on Your PCB Manufacturing Projectors can often be the most annoying piece of technology to work with. You could have a movie night you want to host with an old school projector and some nice, buttery popcorn but be unable to find a spot where the image projected isn’t crooked; you could be trying to give a highly-influential presentation to your peers and bosses, only to encounter that the projector has squished all of your images and graphs; you could be trying to teach Read Article
Boats With The Current: Microstrip and Stripline Transmission Line Trade-offs In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick Carraway, is torn between infiltrating the notorious elite social circles by attending his neighbor Jay Gatsby’s infamous mansion parties in Long Island, New York and establishing himself on the east coast in a finance career. It can be easy to have an understanding of The Great Gatsby through its context - the roaring twenties, flappers, prohibition - it wouldn’t do justice to any of Read Article
The Best Methods of Calculations for Pad Size in PCB Design In our family we have a phrase that we use to describe when a person is surprised, we call it a “Spielberg moment.” Think back to movies like Poltergeist, or Close Encounters, where the characters in the movie would stare with their mouths hanging open at something that was surprising, shocking, or horrifying. This is what I mean by Spielberg moment. The other day while teaching her third graders, my wife gave the kids a Spielberg moment when she Read Article
Cross-Probing Electronic Components in PCB BOM Software I have a friend who once bought a 1968 Bel Air that was in immaculate condition inside and out. There was one problem though: the engine ran really rough. Since my friend was pretty good at working on cars, he bought it for a very low price thinking that he could simply tune it up. It didn’t work though, and my friend came to realize why this beautiful car had come with such a cheap price tag. Then he took a closer look under the hood and was Read Article
Old Wisdom: Best Schematic Software Simplifies Schematic to PCB Synchronizing You’ve heard it said: “there’s no school like the old school.” Is that always true though? When I was a kid my “old school” taught me to type on a typewriter, not a word processor. If I was using that old school typewriter today, it would take me significantly longer to write this article. I wouldn’t have access to spell checking or any of the other helpful utilities that I’ve become accustomed to. I wouldn’t be able to easily backspace and re Read Article
No, I Don’t Want to Make a U-turn: Guidelines for PCB Trace Routing Watching your old town grow up can be a lot like watching your favorite television shows ending, or watching a sequel years after a good movie was released. The town I grew up in was laid out on a grid with streets so wide you didn’t even have to parallel park downtown. It was a town so small that traffic jams were caused by two people in different cars stopping to talk more often than accidents. When I go back to visit, the town has grown; the Read Article
Using Net Ties to Meet PCB Design Requirements The Net Tie is a Component Type that allows PCB Engineers and Designers flexibility when Handling a Variety of Design Challenges. This Paper Explores the Advantages to using Net Ties in Altium Designer to Join Multiple Nets (shorts) Into One Single Net at Very specific Locations in the PCB. TOPICS IN THIS SOLUTION Using Net Ties in PCB Design Types of Net Ties Using Net Ties to Meet PCB Design Requirements: Defining a Net Tie component can just Download PDF
Facilities Management: Smart Buildings Combine IoT and Analytics for Operational Excellence Download PDF