PCB Design Resources and Information

Explore Altium's Resource hub to discover content from blog posts and design guides to technical white papers, all gathered together for your convenience and written by Altium's community of PCB design experts.

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What Does it Take to be a PCB Layout Designer? In the movie “Men of Honor,” Robert De Niro portrayed Billy Sunday, a Navy diving instructor with a challenging pedagogical method. He motivated his student divers by describing how hard their job would be to prepare them for the difficulties of their tasks. He concluded his speech by saying, “I don’t know why anybody would want to be a Navy Diver.” His honesty, in this case, wasn’t intended to be demotivating—sometimes a job takes a certain type Read Article

PCB Designers for SpaceX and Beyond: Yesterday’s Fiction, Tomorrow’s Reality I’ve wanted a career in engineering for as long as I can remember. There were people who could MacGyver something out of nothing and I wanted to be one of those people. I’m sure that watching science fiction on TV added a lot to that. I mean, who wouldn’t want to manipulate technology and control immense power like “Scotty” on Star Trek? I found out that I’m not alone in those dreams—apparently, Scotty was the inspiration for much interest in Read Article

Keep Your PCB Assembly and Production Processes Like Your Best Pants: Seamless I lost a button on an old pair of jeans the other day and I was totally unable to repair it. The seams were all sorts of wonky, and while normally you can find extra buttons along the waist there were none to be found. My mom taught me to always check the seams, but sometimes it’s easy to get lazy and forget to do some of the most basic procedures when you want to get an otherwise grueling experience done with. Some brands are more trustworthy Read Article

Deterministic Solutions to Solve Skew Problems Avoid getting your design "skewed"! Today's guest is Z-Zero's Founder and CEO, Bill Hargin. Together we will dive into the cause of getting skews in your board. Watch now to get answers to your "skews" questions. Read Article

Two Alternative 4 Layer PCB Stackups With 50 Ohms Impedance Need a 4-layer PCB stackup that can support high speed components on both sides of the board? Consider these alternatives to the typical 4-layer stackup. Read Article

Design to Manufacturing with a Single Mouse Click Imagine if you could design your circuit board, run simulations, source your parts, generate an accurate BOM, generate your output files and simply press a “send to manufacturing” button all within your design environment? While that may sound like a far-off dream, this interview with Misha Govshteyn from MacroFab will give you insight into how they are partnering with Altium to make this dream a reality very soon. Judy Warner: Misha, please Read Article

Microstrip Ground Clearance Part 2: How Clearance Affects Losses In a previous article, I provided a discussion and some simulation results on the necessary clearance between impedance controlled traces and nearby grounded copper pour. What we found was that, once the spacing between the pour and the trace becomes too small, the trace becomes an impedance-controlled coplanar waveguide (with or without ground). We also saw that the 3W rule for the spacing between the trace and the grounded copper pour is a bit Read Article

Differential Pairs and Differential Signals

What Are Differential Pair Signals? Differential pairs and differential signaling are the mainstay of high speed digital communication and data transfer. Read Article

What is Signal Integrity? Learn about the basics of signal integrity and how you can ensure your PCB layout complies with best practices for signal integrity. Read Article

Phalanx, not Failure: PCB Shielding to Protect Your Design During 7 B.C., Greek soldiers—or hoplites--carried a large, concave, circular pcb shield called the hoplon. Made from bronze and wood, the hoplon or Argive shield protected hoplites from chin to knee and—when overlapped—became the basis for the Greek phalanx. At the beginning of the 20th century, Ethiopians used their shields when fighting against an invading Italian army. The constant banging on the shields by the Ethiopians mingled with war Read Article

MCAD CoDesigner - Rejection Comments MCAD CoDesigner now displays the complete history of accepted and rejected changes, along with any comments the engineer has entered if a change is rejected. The history of changes is shown in MCAD CoDesigner's panel, making the interaction between the electrical and mechanical engineers more transparent. As soon as changes are applied/rejected on one side, the engineer on the other side is notified, and any rejection comments are displayed Read Article

ISM Bands Around the World ISM bands (industrial, scientific, and medical) are parts of the RF (radio-frequency) spectrum reserved for general use by, as the name suggests, scientific, medical, and industrial devices. Their creation was in response to specific demands by these industries for access to the RF spectrum to perform functions without having to compete with the traditionally intensive users of RF, the communications, and defense sectors. The critical thing to Read Article

Project History in Altium 365 Altium 365’s Project History shows changes to the project's documents and the timeline since the project was launched. Read Article

Interactive Commenting in Altium 365 With Altium 365 Interactive Commenting, your comments provide you instant access and complete visibility to any design changes, so your explanations are all in one place. Read Article

Beginner’s Guide to ESD Protection Circuit Design for PCBs Circuit protection from transient voltages and currents can be applied with ESD protection circuit designs. Learn more about these circuits in our guide for new engineers. Read Article

Choosing the Right Microphone for Embedded Applications If you need to capture sound waves for your electrical device to process, you'll need a microphone. However, microphones these days have become very advanced, and there are so many options to choose from. While they are relatively small, they come with a broad range of options and technologies. They range from the relatively simple and popular condenser type microphones to state-of-the-art sound conversion solutions incorporating internal Read Article

Avoid Re-Placing the Same Parts Over and Over Again with a Pre-Placement Checklist Sometime during the evolution of the automobile, car makers decided that reading and understanding engine gauges were too difficult tasks for the average driver. To remedy this they substituted the check engine light instead; unlike the malfunction indicators of today which are computer controlled warnings, those early check engine lights would only tell you of a problem once it was occurring. Reporting a problem after it occurs is not the Read Article