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.

Designing Physical Layer Security for Military PCBs in Altium Designer PCBs for military systems are high performing beasts that must meet stringent design and performance standards. Military systems that store and process sensitive data require extra layers of security that goes beyond locking them in a secure enclosure. You’ll need to design your Printed Circuit Boards to be extremely resistant to EMI, route data so that it cannot be tapped passively, and include blacked-out chips to prevent attackers from Read Article

Data Management for Component Models in SPICE Simulations Simulation software is becoming more powerful as time goes on, but the simplest solutions are sometimes still preferable for many applications. SPICE simulations have been around for decades, yet their applicability to a wide variety of circuits and applications is not lost on anyone. With SPICE simulation tools being so popular, it’s only natural that they appear in PCB design software platforms. Devices continue to become more powerful and more Read Article

Changing PCB Reference Planes During Routing in Multilayer Boards Routing through multiple PCB reference planes is not the best routing strategy, but there are some simple design tips that can help. Read Article

Complete Guide to DIY SMT Assembly In Your Office I want to share a little secret with you in this article: Assembling SMT prototypes boards is not only easy, but it requires very little equipment. Using just a stencil, I can easily hand prototype down to 0.3 mm pitch ICs, and 0201 (imperial) sized passive components. Tiny wafer-scale components can definitely be a challenge, but the majority of prototypes that are regularly produced can be hand-assembled in a couple of hours with production Read Article

Transmission Line Fundamentals And Electromagnetic Fields, Part 1 Learn more about transmission line fundamentals and how they carry electromagnetic fields. Read Article

OnTrack Newsletter: Component Shortages, Industry Trends and Online Education - March 2021 OnTrack Newsletter March 2021 VOL. 4 No 6 State of the Electronics Industry 2021 Vincent Mazur, Technical Product Marketing Engineer, Altium Ltd. With the challenges of 2020 behind us, what challenges and opportunities lie ahead for hardware designers in 2021? In this article, Vince Mazur, Technical Product Marketing Engineer at Altium looks ahead to three emerging trends and share steps to address each one successfully in the year ahead. Read Read Article

Your Complete Guide to Via Stub Analysis Via stub accumulate loss for high speed and high frequency signals. Here’s how you can spot problems with stubs and solve them easily. Read Article

The What, Why and How of Data Management More than 15 million components to choose from to design your board, where do you begin? Watch and learn from the Library Management expert himself John Watson. Read Article

State of the Electronics Industry 2021 With the challenges of 2020 behind us, what challenges and opportunities lie ahead for hardware designers in 2021? In this article Vince Mazur, Technical Product Marketing Engineer at Altium, looks ahead to three emerging trends and share steps to address each one successfully in the year ahead. Introduction It's an understatement to say that 2020 is a year that we won't soon forget. Last year imposed many new challenges on all of us-- Read Article

The Best Printed Circuit Board Design Software for Your Aluminum PCB Whether for thermal performance, electrical isolation, or mechanical strength, your aluminum PCB needs the precision of Altium Designer to meet your design requirements. Altium Designer allows almost any aspect of your circuit boards to be customized, including the metal core or backing on an aluminum PCB. Designers can also specify other materials in their documentation for their fabricator, such as ceramics, aluminum flex PCBs, or other Read Article

Create, Share, Collaborate, and View CAD Drawings with Altium Designer PCB design collaboration is easy with a complete set of design tools and a cloud platform to view CAD drawings. Your PCB design features should make it easy to create a circuit board and take it through manufacturing. Instead of settling for freeware CAD programs or mechanical programs like AutoCAD, your team can connect through powerful tools that allow secure access to all design files in a PCB project. Whether you need to view your board or Read Article

With Altium Designers PCBDOC Viewer Nothing is Left to Chance With Altium’s free PCBDOC viewer, every member of your design team will have read-only access to your design data leaving nothing to chance. ALTIUM DESIGNER Any kind of file viewing should be an easy process for your PCB design software. Your printed circuit board design may have started with just yourself or a small team of people, but by the time it is completed there will be a lot more involved. There will be people checking to make sure that Read Article

The Mysterious 50 Ohm Impedance: Where It Came From and Why We Use It 50 Ohm impedance became the standard impedance used in RF transmission lines long ago, but it is still useful today and is a standard reference impedance used in test equipment. Read Article

36:34 SPICE Simulation Made Simple SPICE simulation saves you critical time in the prototyping phase. Understanding your simulation interface makes it simple to analyze how Watch Video

The SOSA Standard: What PCB Designers Need to Know Learn more about the new SOSA standard for embedded systems. PCB designers working on aerospace and military embedded systems will need to design to this standard. Read Article

Jira for Hardware Development: Tools and Processes New collaboration tools can create a Jira for hardware development-type process for PCB designers and electrical engineers. Read Article

Common Printed Circuit Board Defects You Can Fix in the Cloud Solve these printed circuit board defects you can fix with the cloud collaboration tools in Altium Designer. Read Article