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

High Voltage PCB Design: Creepage and Clearance Distance High voltage applications require more rigorous design parameters than your average PCB. When I was an undergrad, I did a lot of electrochemical etching. I put it on my resume for years, because interviewers were always interested in hearing about working with high voltage sources and terrifying chemicals. That was when I started looking into high voltage design. I was amazed by the standards that are required for high voltage products. I was Read Article
Internet of Things Hardware Platforms Are Becoming Flexible Do you remember all the fads and obsessions you had when you were a kid? When I was younger everyone was going crazy for Pokemon and whatever electronic gadgets they could get their hands on. These two crazes eventually combined into one ultimate trend, the Tamagotchi. It was a huge hit, building on the portable electronic fever and children’s love of tiny unrealistic animals. Recently two fads in the PCB world have combined, flexible electronics Read Article
Capturing Key PCB Design Elements in the Design Document One of the most important yet often avoided aspects of documenting a design is the formal design document. Too often we finish the design, generate fabrication, assembly, and validation documents then consider the job done. Properly capturing the system specification, design intent, design process and traceability back to the specification is a time-consuming and arduous yet very necessary task. The design document must capture all aspects of the Read Article
USB Type-C: A New Frontier for Power and Data Transmission When it comes to PCB design, imbalanced power demands in your board can knock the wind right out of your sails. Power discrepancies can quickly turn the tide of your design process and can be extremely difficult to amend without having to do considerable rework. So what’s the solution for getting your voltage levels just right, and is it possible to increase the transmission of data while reducing your power consumption? To start, you’d need a Read Article
Structural Integrity and the Challenges of Rigid-Flex PCB Design With the advent of rigid-flex, we’ve been able to fit more in a smaller form factor than ever before. Not only that but rigid-flex designs have an edge over rigid designs in weight and reliability. I could write a blog on just the advantages of rigid-flex, but I’ll leave that for another day. Rigid-flex is great, but there are some things you need to be aware of when you work with it. What I’d like to highlight in this blog are the routing Read Article
Designing General Controller Printed Circuit Boards I always thought that to be successful you need to emulate the success of others. When I started my career, there weren’t any single board computers like Raspberry Pi, and no one took Arduino seriously for industrial applications. You can imagine how bad it was the first time I did maintenance on a general purpose controller that I designed. It was a fire alarm controller that had over 50 wires manually screwed onto it. I had to replace a faulty Read Article
PCB Circuit Products: Should You Design for Repair? As an engineer, I always feel like it’s a personal failing when I have to call someone else in to fix my stuff. Whether it’s electronics or the occasional bit of haphazard woodwork, I can’t ask for help until I’ve tried to sort it out. Plumbing, however, is another story. Then I call for help immediately. The problem with the impulse to fix your own stuff is that a lot of companies don’t actually want you to. I can’t count the number of times Read Article
Semiconductor Fiber Could Replace Fiber Optic Cable Transmission Lines The Internet is a strange and wonderful place. I grew up at the end of the age of dial up Internet when chat rooms were all the rage. Now I occasionally enjoy using the Internet to play some online games, which was impossible back then. My telephone router and its copper network could barely support enough bandwidth to load an image. Now our networks have been upgraded with blazing fast fiber optics. While these communication systems are Read Article
Spin Wave Breakthrough Could Lead To Ultra Low Power Non Volatile Memory At my university, we weren’t required to take quantum mechanics. The whole premise behind it is that you can never truly “know” anything, just the probability of something right? It sounded a bit silly to me. Then I got into high-level electromagnetics and signal processing and had to deal with a lot more numbers that didn’t make sense. I’m glad some people decided to take that course because they are the ones making breakthroughs in quantum Read Article
Why You Should Follow These Best Practices In Real Time Clock Design Have you ever been late for school because your alarm clock decided to stop at 3.15 AM? In high school, my alarm clock wasn’t very pleasant sounding, but the sound of my mom shouting at me was worse. I knew that my clock had stopped because its battery was dead. However, had I paid closer attention, I would have noticed that my clock ran slower as the battery drained off. That way I could have changed it in time and avoided rising to my mom’s Read Article
How Google Glass Technology Works and What Makes It Tick Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If that’s the case then Google must employ a lot of witches and warlocks. They’ve been pushing the tech envelope for years and many of their ideas are now coming to fruition. Products like their self-driving cars are almost here, and I’m personally hopeful about a smart sensor platform that Google helped fund. By far the coolest take we’ve been Read Article
Google Glass Enterprise Edition Breaks Into Workplace Market Editorial credit: Peppinuzzo / Shutterstock.com Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be the first to do something? It must be a grand feeling to go where no man has gone before, whether that place is a mountain or the moon. There are also a lot of risks that come with maiden voyages. You can plan all you want, but the only way to find out what lies on the edge of the horizon is to go there. Google, now Alphabet, has long been a pioneer in the Read Article
Should You Place Bypass Capacitors Before or After the Circuit: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Should You Place Bypass Capacitors Before or After the Circuit. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you Read Article
Advanced PCB Design Solutions Require Short and Long Term EDA Software: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Advanced PCB Design Solutions Require Short and Long Term EDA Software. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what Read Article
Everything You Need to Know About Micro Via PCB Design Techniques: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Everything You Need to Know About Micro Via PCB Design Techniques. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you Read Article
How to Design MicroSD Power Circuits Without Destabilizing the On-Board Voltage Supply: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: How to Design MicroSD Power Circuits Without Destabilizing the On-Board Voltage Supply. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and Read Article
Why Simulation Is Critical to Success in Developing Autonomous Systems Simulation-driven design is essential to ensuring that autonomous systems will operate without error once in the hands of consumers. By illustrating how Best-in-Class firms are implementing simulations throughout the design and testing process and discussing this in terms of autonomous systems such as vehicles, drones, and robots, these findings underscore the necessity of simulations in this innovative new field. Key findings include: The Download PDF